Hope and Quiet Despair in On the Calculation of Volume Book 1 by Solvej Balle

“It is the eighteenth of November. Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November. I no longer expect to wake up to the nineteenth of November and I no longer remember the seventeenth of November as if it were yesterday.” Literature has a rhythm wholly unique to the tackling of a Groundhog Day-style scenario, as Solvej Balle shows in this first volume of On the Calculation of Volume (2024)