On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV)
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
The fourth installment of Balle’s expansive, and highly ambitious On the Calculation of Volume teems with new faces, new people, and voices from every corner of the western world
We’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle’s riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world—fellow travelers within November 18th—and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself–must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara’s notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one—not even Tara, our steady cataloger and cartographer of the endless November day—could have foreseen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Balle picks up her remarkable seven-part saga of a woman caught in a time loop with this stimulating account of a commune of people who are similarly stuck reliving the same day. Narrator Tara Selter, a Cologne-based rare book dealer who began repeating the 18th of November 1,891 days earlier, has been living in a vacant house in Bremen with three others she found over the course of her travels through Europe. They are joined by four more, including a couple, Peter and Sonia, who found each other after casually hooking up with a series of strangers, and whose love, now that they've committed to each other, unsettles Tara, who misses her husband and, given the fact that her body is aging, thinks increasingly of death. More people stuck in time loops find them, and as they hold meetings in which the agenda items range from household chores to philosophical questions, such as whether they should view their condition as an opportunity to help others, or if they're "monsters" drawing too much on the world's resources, Balle continues to expand on themes introduced in earlier entries. Near the end, a miraculous new development occurs. This will leave readers counting down the days to the next installment.
