Novella Readathon #2: On the Calculation of Volume

I’m not a connoisseur of time travel stories, but On the Calculation of Volume is certainly unlike any other I’ve read, and I was impressed with how this story managed to be intense and restrained at the same time. The book isn’t going to be for everyone – a lot of genre fiction fans will bounce off this, I think – but for people who are interested in something more reflective, this is excellent.

Comparable Media: The Other Valley, Virginia Woolf’s writing, The Bone Harp

Elevator Pitch:
Tara does not know why she has repeated the 18th of November a hundred times. There seems to be nothing remarkable about that day – the first one of course – or even the 17th of November. However, she finds herself in an endlessly looping day, with a husband who thinks she is on a trip to France for work. This is her journal, and Tara is not okay.

What Worked for Me:
This book had one of the best openings I’ve read in a while. It starts with Tara sitting in the guest bedroom of her home, listening to her husband. An almost obsessive focus is placed on the various sounds that Thomas makes: the opening of a cupboard or the scrape of a door. You would not think that this man held any emotional significance to Tara, someone who is more a collection of noise rather than a person with emotions and thoughts. This immediately sets the tone for a book that is psychologically surreal and tangibly mundane. On the Calculation of Volume is anchored to Tara’s lived experience, and her isolation is so suffocating that it inverted her relationship with the love of her life. The opening was both immediately gripping and also an example of excellently crafted prose – shout out to both Balle and Haveland (who translated the book). You don’t find that combination often, and I knew I was in for something special.

This melancholy tone continues through the entire novella. Sounds maintain a prominent place in the story, which traces the first year of Tara’s time loop (the largest page count is dedicated to the first few days). I was most impressed with how convincing and engaging Tara’s shifting relationship with time, her house, her husband, and herself were represented. The experience of this book felt like watching a river pick up grains of sand, pieces of Tara’s identity, and whisking them away. Like a geode, Tara finds herself hollowed out: optimism and exploration fade into endless repetition and mundanity. The time loop is no longer a thing happening to her. It is her. You can no longer separate Tara the person from the experience of looping.

The time loop isn’t perfect. The rules are loose – time travel purists, you will leave disappointed – but it boils down to this: everything resets unless Tara makes permanent change to it, or if she keeps it close to herself. Eaten pizza remains eaten, the pages you read are her journal, kept in perpetuity through her daily time loops. Thus, she still impacts the world, watches as her looping empties the local grocery store of her favorite foods. Pages are spent fixated on a leek that her husband uses every day for soup, yet when she picks one of her own it is gone forever. She is a monster, consuming the world around her like a plague of locusts. She is at once a scourge upon the world and also a ghost who does not exist. When this book hit, it was a sledgehammer to the gut. On the Calculation of Volume is a story that convinces you that time travel would not be nearly as much fun as some books make it out to be.

What Didn’t Work For Me:
Look, I love pretty much everything about the way this is written. I think if I hadn’t read the thing in a single day it would have been an easy 5 star read. However, when binged, I think On the Calculation of Volume began to wear on me. Thematically, the constant grind of Tara listening to sounds and considering her situation and getting lost and anchored in cycles is apt: the prose and structure of the novella reflect the experience of our protagonist. Like the tide, her psychological presence rises and fades, pursing new ideas only to be sucked back into allowing the days to pass her by. There were several times where I rewound a page after realizing my eyes had glazed over. None of the writing is dense either; this book probably is easier to read than the average Epic Fantasy. However, Balle’s relentlessness in how she tackles Tara’s mental bled over into me as the reader. My brain fog was Tara’s brain fog, and we became one and the same. Sometimes though, the experience of good writing is not always one I enjoy.

Certainly, avoid this book if you are averse to repetition and aimlessness in books. Some lip service is paid to Tara’s efforts to try and get out of the loop, but this is not the thrust of what the book asks the reader to focus on. Otherwise, don’t try to race through this one. Read a bit at a time, nibbling away at it like a piece of orange chocolate. I’m absolutely picking up the sequel, but I’ll need a long break before returning to the oppressiveness of Balle’s writing.

Conclusion: Masterfully written and translated. Most people on this sub will hate it, but its incredibly well executed, and an approachable novella for people who haven’t read much Literary Science Fiction