On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV)
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Apr 14, 2026
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- $9.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $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
In the ingenious third installment of Balle's septology, Danish rare book dealer Tara Selter is still trapped in the 18th of November. However, she now finds that she's not the only one stuck in time. At a lecture on Roman grain and rye in Dusseldorf, she encounters Henry Dale, a Norwegian sociologist who, finding that his time seems infinite, has devoted himself to learning. Tara and Henry promptly spend the next 200 days together, comparing notes on their shared experience ("We talk about the unreliability of things, the nightly transition, our bewilderment, and the little battles fought against the phenomena of the eighteenth of November"). Encouraged that "there's a future out there somewhere," Tara returns to her husband, Thomas, and tries to adjust to the fact that each morning, he has no memory of their time together the day before. But she's thrust back into the mysteries of November 18 when a manic 17-year-old girl named Olga Periti approaches her to say that she, too, is stuck, and she needs Tara's help finding her missing companion, Ralf Kern, who's also stuck in November 18. As Tara, Henry, and Olga search for Ralf, each tries to come to terms with the knowledge that if nothing can ever get better, they're "heading toward death in a world that has come to a standstill." Endlessly fascinating, supple, and tenderly human, Balle's masterpiece reaches new heights.
