On the Calculation of Volume I - Solvej Balle
A review of Solvej Balle’s novel about unshared time.
Translated by Barbara J. Haveland · 192 pages · Paperback · Faber & Faber, 2025 · English
Living Alone in Time
This novel is often introduced through a convenient shortcut: a woman relives the same day again and again. The comparison that usually follows is Groundhog Day. That framing misses the point. Solvej Balle is not interested in irony, transformation, or escape. Repetition here is not a device. It is the permanent condition under which a life must be lived.
At the centre of the book is Tara, and the novel never lets her dissolve into abstraction. Her suffering is not theoretical. It is relational, bodily, sustained. The book asks what happens when one person continues through time alone while everyone else resets, and it answers by staying close to the cost of that imbalance.
The novel’s discipline lies in how little it allows to change. The loop remains stable. The prose remains level. Meaning does not arrive through events or revelations but through duration. Pages matter because they add weight, not information. Emotion builds slowly and settles rather than peaking. Sadness does not announce itself; it accumulates.
As shared memory collapses, Tara’s loneliness sharpens. People remain present. Love remains possible. What disappears is shared time. Her attempts to explain herself do not fail because she is not believed, but because belief cannot last. The pain here comes from clarity rather than confusion. Tara understands exactly what is happening, and that understanding isolates her further.
In response, the novel shifts its energy away from dialogue and towards procedure. Counting, noting, recording begin to replace conversation. Writing becomes structural rather than expressive. Tara’s notebook is not a comfort or a confession; it is the only thing that moves forward with her. It preserves coherence but offers no relief. Identity remains intact even as endurance grows harder.
What makes the book distinctive is that this clarity offers no compensation. Awareness does not lead to growth. Endurance does not produce insight. Tara’s loneliness deepens precisely because she remains lucid. The reader is held to the same terms: attention without payoff, continuity without reassurance.
The ending does not solve the condition or reframe it as meaningful. It allows a change in stance instead. Movement without explanation, presence without record. Tara does not escape what is happening to her. She meets it differently.
This is a severe, exact novel about unshared time and the quiet damage it causes. Its power comes from how closely it holds form and experience together, and from how honestly it stays with Tara’s pain without softening it into lesson or metaphor.
Five stars. No qualifiers. Some books impress. This one stays with you.