I couldn’t confidently say anything around me was real the first time I read “On the Calculation of Volume” by Solvej Balle. Her images burned so fantastically into my mind’s eye that it seemed completely possible that the pale, thin outline of my desk and the numb edges of the book I was grasping were entirely hallucinated.
I could experience Balle’s imaginary world so vividly through the narrator that I imagined they were experiencing my world through me. I felt that the magic of the novel had sprung into my waking world, and I could switch bodies with a fictional character. I have zero explanation for how Balle does it.
“On the Calculation of Volume” is about a woman named Tara Selter trapped in a time loop. Despite its premise, the novel is in no way science fiction — Tara does not propose any scientific explanation for the loop or engineer a time machine that malfunctions horribly. The novel is best described as a thought experiment — it asks the listener to imagine themselves in a vastly different circumstance and to describe how they would respond.
Through changing a question into a novel, Balle removes the choice from the thought experiment. The reader is involuntarily wrenched into her world and is forced to accept the emotions, ideas and actions of the narrator as their own. Balle’s universe is so rich that it leaves no room for any of the reader’s opinions or theories.
Having completely forgotten my own experience, I was forced to feel the entirety of Tara’s existential loss. The first thing the time loop destroys is her relationship with her husband. Tara can no longer recognize him as human as he repeats the same movements every day. She then loses seasons, which she hunts by biking to different climates around Europe:
“I miss a winter with a thin layer of snow in a garden with leeks and Swiss chard. So I find a garden. I find an empty house. I find duvets and blankets and in the morning I can look out on a garden covered in a thin layer of snow.”
The time loop robs her of any kind of future, so she is forced to lavish endless care into constructing and describing immediate moments. The scene where she finds spring at a grocery store in London and describes its endless array of fruit is particularly beautiful.
A multi-page inventory of a fruit display sounds excruciatingly boring, but her character’s pleasure in taking in the physical world around her is so infectious it makes you want to drive to a grocery store for the express reason of staring at fruit. It makes you want to experiment and see how much pleasure you can experience by being more attentive to your surroundings.
While reading, I realized that my own anxieties regarding the future were preventing me from experiencing the immediate as intensely as Tara. It urged me to take a proper look inside a grocery store, to notice the trees on 6th Avenue or study the grain of the bookshelves in Denison Library.
Appreciating beauty can strip away your worries, which allows you to experience what’s in front of you in an even sharper resolution. It is so easy to forget that the Pomona Farm is a bike ride away or that Scripps is full of fruit trees. You can collect a bunch of kumquats and sit on the grass to think about how bright orange they are and how blue the sky is.
I don’t live in a Swedish cottage with a fireplace and a view of a vegetable garden. I live in probably the complete opposite of that. I’ve made no effort to decorate my dorm, and I’ve thrown tangles of wire and construction equipment I’m using to build a camper in the corner of my room. There’s a pile of sand knocked off my wetsuit in my closet and a cloud of dust floating around the plywood I’ve shoved beneath my bookshelf. It’s been described as serial-killery by guests.
Rereading “On the Calculation of Volume” made me realize that my choice to surround myself with plywood and grime affected my mood. If Tara could find so much joy in collecting brightly colored fruit, I could find some pleasure in rearranging my bookshelf or thrifting myself a nice sweater. That’s the magic of “On the Calculation of Volume:” it completely rips you from your world, showing you one that is somehow richer despite being stripped of time, and then sends you back to yours with a dedication to improve it.
Liam Riley PO ’26 is from East Tennessee. He likes giving book recommendations, the outdoors and shenanigans. Reach out to him if you want to help build an underground sauna in his buddy’s backyard.
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