On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle

        Life is full of repetitions. Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I documents such repetitions in Tara Selter’s numbered journal entries as she wakes up on November eighteenth over and over and over again. Everyone else follows the same routines; the same woman drops the same piece of toast at breakfast, her same husband turns on the same light at the same time. And every day resets.

Life is full of repetitions. Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I draws on the conventions of time loop stories, perhaps with Groundhog Day as its most accessible analogue. Yet, for me, this year also feels like a bit of a time loop in my reading. I feel like I’m in a year of reading novels about women in isolated, repetitious lives that defy explanation. I’m thinking in particular about Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall, in which a wall mysteriously descends on the protagonist, who journals the repetitious cycles of her life.

Life is full of repetitions, but Solve Balle’s On The Calculation of Volume I does something unique in its world-building. The rules are never made transparent for how, exactly, the time loop works. Tara begins the day in Paris but returns home to her husband on her second November eighteenth and is allowed to wake up there. In experiments with her husband, the objects they have displaced gradually disappear or reposition themselves when they’re unnoticed. Tara’s bank account resets each “new” day, but the purchases she makes largely seem to stay with her—so much so that stores start running out of the tea she buys every day. There are cracks and fissures and ambiguities.

Life is full of repetitions, and Solve Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I demonstrates how what is unusual compels us toward reflection. There is a passage early in the text where Tara reflects as follows:

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable. (32-33)

Similar to The Wall, there’s a sort of resignation, at times, that this is just how things are and will be. Of course, after more than three hundred days of the same day, she also degenerates into paranoiac lines of thinking. She starts thinking of how to escape the repetition. Is it best to be a butterfly flitting about and waiting for change? Or to be a bull in a china shop wrecking everything? Or try to fix something or observe something she never did before? These desperate times (er…time) create escape fantasies to try to restore her to the probable.

Life is full of repetitions, but On the Calculation of Volume I explores some genre conventions in a way I’ve not seen before. It’s kind of interesting to class the novel as science fiction. It’s a sort of accidental time travel novel but rather than having a scientist trying to deduce how to make time travel happen, we have a character who is meant to overcome it. For the first portion of the novel, she attempts what could be considered a version of the scientific method. She begins by documenting observable phenomena and using it to convince her husband that she is stuck in a time loop—to his credit, he believes her (which is its own interesting inversion of time loop tales). The two conduct research and consult one another, though it becomes too laborious for Tara to explain everything they’ve already tried to limit the number of false start hypotheses. Their experiments prove fruitless, unmanageable, unpredictable. So, she moves out and tries to pay attention to the minutiae to see what kinds of things stop following patterns. For instance, does the woman who drops her groceries drop 5 coins instead of 6?

Life is full of repetitions, but On the Calculation of Volume I sets up a really interesting distinction between ghosts and monsters. When Tara eats a leek from the garden and it is not there the next day, she realizes her capacity for consumption: “It was me who made things disappear. That must be it. I am living in a time that eats up the world” (103). She continues on to note that every day her husband’s world is repaired; he seems to leave no mark on the world, leading Tara to conclude, “Thomas is a ghost and I am a monster”(103). She continues, “It is time that has done this. Without me Thomas is a ghost, but I am a monster, a beast, a pest” (103). The meditation is a compelling one and continues as follows:

It’s not that I didn’t know this. It’s not that I haven’t seen the shelves growing barer and barer, but now it’s a problem. It makes a difference. If Thomas is a ghost and I am a monster then the distance between us is greater than I thought. Thomas leaves no trail in the world, I eat it up. He is a pattern in the house, I am a monster in the guest room. If I go out there we will be two monsters. I will drag him into my world and we will eat for two. It is me who makes the difference. He is a ghost and ghosts haunt. They return, again and again. Monsters rampage through the world and leave it devastated. (103)

Monsters-as-metaphors is already fruitful ground to walk, and Balle adds to the discourse of consumption. It’s a compelling inversion. Given that Tara is largely imperceptible, haunting the same day, the same streets, day in and (well, actually) day in again, she would appear to be a ghost. Yet she’s on a different plane entirely, consuming more and more of the world that others have left behind. A scavenger beast. That idea of ravenous consumption gets paired with the scientific method a little later on when Tara buys a telescope to examine alterations in the night sky:

You get huge, hungry eyes, you intrude, you invade. You meddle in the affairs of the firmament and I can tell that the more familiar I become with the night sky, the more stars that are identified, the more of the moon’s surface I see, the bigger I get. I invade space, I fill the world. That is another way of being a monster. In the darkness. In the garden. With ravenous eyes. A monster clad in wool. (125)

The book is compelling in the way it engages with science, consumption, probability, and finitude. What would it mean, for instance, to experience every single thing that one day has to offer? Even just one slice of the infinite is still infinite—and are we ravenous beasts for wanting our share?

Life is full of repetitions, even as On the Calculation of Volume I concludes. There are very few resolutions. What kind of thing is time? Is it a unit of measurement? A substance? A creature? Solvej Balle offers us some deep questions which, I’m sure, will only be addressed when we move forward in time. That is, when we read the remaining six volumes of On the Calculation of Volume. 

As an aside, how fun is it that repetition is built into the title of the book itself? In a multi-volume series, you’re forced to say On the Calculation of Volume Volume I.

Life is full of repetitions. Happy reading.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

    Shortlisted for 2025’s International Booker Prize, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection has rightly gotten a fair amount of attention from avid readers. Between the premise and style of the book, there is a lot to like. Perfection is about two expats living as creatives in Berlin, creating templates for websites or doing graphic design work for other creatives. Plot-wise, it’s pretty thin. We get a chapter, for instance, about what their apartment looks like. We get a chapter about their work. A chapter on what they do for fun. A chapter on their sex lives. Then, the final few chapters see their friends leaving Berlin and, feeling creeping ennui, sees them leaving Berlin for lackluster-to-dreadful experiences in Portugal and Sicily before Anna’s uncle dies and them establishing a hotel from his property.

    Character-wise, the book is a little bit thin there, too: Anna and Tom are consistently described as a unit. Perfection has two characters that never engage in dialogue and are distinguished from one another very rarely. They seem to experience the same joys, the same fears in leaving Berlin, the same sense of the present disappearing, the same hopes.

    Describing the plot as thin and the central characters as uniform, though, doesn’t really do the book justice. Perfection is conducted in such a stylistically interesting way.  The opening chapter of the book is just descriptions of photographs of an apartment at different angles. It’s a rich, imagistic tableau. The book is also divided into different verb tenses (present, imperfect, remote, future), and the style reflects the phases of AnnaTom / TomAnna’s lives. The book is replete with would bes and wills. The shifting verb tenses reflect the precarity of our lives and offer a commentary on our relationship to time in the present day.

    I suspect the prime appeal of Latronico’s novel is the commentary it offers on modern life, which cuts both ways. Tom and Anna love their remote jobs…sort of. The isolation isn’t ideal, but they are able to connect with other creatives. At the same time, they obsess over social media and post photos from wherever they are with the express purpose of making other people feel bad about not giving up steady work to travel and operate as creatives. The recurring description of their work as creating slightly-off-centered boxes parallels and critiques Tom and Anna’s frustration of everything being the same: they are creating the uniformity that bores them. But it pays the bills. The book also speaks to the collective ennui of experiences and our need for the new, different, and challenging against the more likely satisfying regularity. Tom and Anna’s sex life exemplifies that experience: they are consistently satisfied by one another, sometimes try to add something new into the routine, but ultimately are not adventurous enough to really push beyond what they know. Even when they attend sex clubs together, they do not venture out of their dyad, grateful that they do not have to take any STD tests.

    The end of the book is pretty interesting, too. In the final chapter, Tom and Anna take on managing a hotel. They host a number of clients for a weekend and then are set to restore the rooms to their previous condition. They must retain the image as presented on the website, which is a nice bookend to the first chapter. The reviewer to whom they offered a room publishes the piece with descriptions that they had agreed upon. The question is whether the effort that goes into crafting their lives is truly worth the detriment to the authenticity of their experiences. An open question.

    All things considered, Perfection doesn’t quite live up to its namesake, but the thoughtful project is uniquely memorable. It’s part novella-length character study, part commentary on the gig economy and the lives of remote workers, part existential reflection. It is / would be / will be a good book to take on.

    Happy reading!

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention---and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Har

    It’s no secret that every beep, boop, and buzz draws us away from our inner calm into a whirlwind of distraction. In that respect, Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again is nothing revolutionary. Anecdotally, you already know what Hari confirms with research: modern life is comprised of interruptions that prevent us from thinking deeply. Hari sites studies about the average number of interruptions we face, the length of time it takes to enter a flow state of thinking, and the ultimate inefficacy of so-called multitasking. In addition to the research, Hari provides relatable personal anecdotes to help characterize the phenomenon.

    Whenever I read nonfiction, I think about titles and subtitles. I think about the promises they offer. Stolen Focus offers a promise to think deeply again and, technically, Hari delivers on that promise. The final chapter offers a primer on how to change habits in order to maintain focus—things like digital detoxing and setting times for when you’ll allow yourself to check your e-mail. That said, though, even Hari recognizes that personal changes are not enough. Like recycling in response to climate change, the onus (and the shame) is displaced onto individuals rather than those who are truly responsible for stealing our focus. 

    To Hari’s credit, he places the phenomenon in the broader technological and political contexts from which it has arisen. What’s at the heart of this problem? The same thing as for all problems: capitalism. Take, for instance, Google, whose business model is based on maintaining the engagement of its audience. They design ways of keeping you focused on their own products and services (one need look only so far as its new “AI Summary” feature—it’s there so that you don’t actually have to click away from Google itself). Hari recounts how one employee at the company suggested scaling back on push notifications—rather than sending an alert to your phone every time you receive an e-mail, you’d instead receive an update once a day—and he was essentially laughed out of the room. Apply that, and other tactics, to an already vulnerable populace that is burnt out from overwork, stress, poor diets…it’s a recipe for manipulation.

    To that end, Hari notes that personal commitments to improve our focus are insufficient and to suggest that we can simply restore our own focus offers us a “cruel optimism” in light of more systemic issues. The problem with systemic issues, though, is that they have far-reaching implications for mass-society and politics in particular. When people are not able to focus, they are not able to organize. Yet, all of the major issues in our society require collective, deep thinking. If we are to solve the environmental crisis, we will need to coordinate our efforts and communicate with one another and take action over long periods of time. That cannot be done if the threshold of our focus is a thirty second TikTok.

    This all plays into the hands of corporate interests and exploitative politicians. When nobody has the capacity to think through the implications of policy, do the research, fact-check politicians’ claims, it leaves the most vulnerable unprotected from policies that are actively harmful. Again, this is nothing surprising or even controversial.

    Stolen Focus delves into the medicalization of inattentiveness (i.e. through our collective response to ADHD). Essentially, the issue is that we don’t look enough at root causes and instead try to medicate the problem away. While medication can be effective, Hari’s approach is more of socio-psychological one that critiques the factors that contribute to a rise in inattention, including factors such as poor diet, constant distractions via media, and so forth. We’re at a cultural moment where ADHD is increasingly “normal” and yet there are a number of mitigating factors we might consider to help to manage it. This part of the book was of less interest to me, but still offered some valuable insight into both science and culture.

    All things considered, Stolen Focus likely won’t revolutionize your thinking. It will affirm your experiences, give you the language with which to discuss them, and inspire you to change some habits to restore the attention you deserve—and hopefully inspire you to change the world in turn.

    Happy reading!