“How on earth did this book come into being? It’s like it has always been here in this world with us, like one feels about the best art. I am torn as I read it between lingering and racing ahead, and I think about my days completely differently now.” — Sheila Heti

Lizzie Whitman convenes this casual book club around Solvej Balle’s utterly riveting On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) — the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.” Balle was also nominated for the International Booker Prize and a National Book Award for this book.

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November 18 repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning on the same exact day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. And as she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”

Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

Can’t make the event? Order On the Calculation of Volume here.

About the artist

Lizzie Whitman is a local educator, reader, and book club enthusiast. With an education in the Great Books Program and linguistics, she has been asking the question, “What are you reading right now?” for decades.

Core support for the Department of Public Programs is provided by the WLS Spencer Foundation.