NAIBAhood Book Club: On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) with Julia Fleischaker

When bookselling is your career, it's easy to get bogged down in the quotidian like ordering, operations, payroll, events and to forget about why you got into this in the first place: the books! That’s where our new NAIBAhood Book Club comes in. It’s a labor of love from our board, and each board member (and bookseller) picked a book that means something to them to read along with you. Lots of backlist, nothing over 400 pages, and no obligation to join every month. So get into your pajamas, pour yourself a cup of tea and get ready to remind yourself why you do this. It’s for the BOOKS!

Our March leader will be Board Treasurer Julia Fleischaker of Greedy Reeds. Her selection is On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) by Solvej Balle. 

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: 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 into the same 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. (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.

The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.