On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) (Unabridged)
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A literary phenomenon nearly forty years in the making, and a speculative masterwork” (New York Magazine), Balle’s epic On the Calculation of Volume in Book III introduces new thrills to the adventures of Tara Selter’s endless November day
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
In the marvelous third installment of Balle’s “astonishing” (The Washington Post) septology, Tara’s November 18th transforms when she discovers that she is no longer alone in her endless autumnal day. For she has met someone who remembers, and who knows as well as she does that “it is autumn, but that we’re not heading into winter. That spring and summer will not follow. That the reds and yellows of the trees are here to stay. That yesterday doesn’t mean the seventeenth of November, that tomorrow means the eighteenth, and that the nineteenth is a day we may never see.”
Where Book I and II focused on a single woman’s involuntary journey away from her life and her loved ones and into the chasm of time, Book III brings us back into the realm of companionship, with all its thrills, odd quirks, and a sense of mutual bewilderment at having to relearn how to exist alongside others in a shared reality. And then, of course, what of Tara’s husband Thomas, still sitting alone day after day, entirely unawares, in their house in Clarion-sous-Bois, waiting for his wife to return?
Blending poetry and philosophical inquiry with rich reflections on our discombobulating times, Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume asks us to consider: What is a single person’s responsibility to humanity and to the preservation of this world?
Customer Reviews
The Loop Makes Room
Great continuity in the narration
Vol III changes the temperature of the series.
The first two volumes were solitary books. They narrowed the world to repetition, accounting, and fatigue. Time stalled, and meaning thinned. Book III shifts that condition by introducing others.
Rather than refining the same condition again, this volume alters it. Isolation gives way to shared living, and the series takes on a different shape without abandoning its discipline. Once the loop is shared, the problem changes form. What follows is not plot escalation but adjustment. People learn one another’s habits. Friction appears. Routines settle. Space and responsibility are negotiated. The day becomes something lived together rather than endured alone.
The ethical focus shifts with it. The aim is no longer repair or escape, but harm reduction. Attention turns to the present: preventing accidents, organising care, making the day workable. These actions remain small and practical. Their force lies in repetition and accumulation.
Nothing is resolved. Time does not restart. No explanation arrives. Yet the atmosphere lightens. Suffering is no longer borne alone. The burden moves from isolation to coexistence.
Vol. III does not undo what came before. It answers it. The shift is quiet, structural, and sustained.