"Autumn came with the idea, somehow"
A Q&A with Solvej Balle, author of On the Calculation of Volume
We’re proud that both novels we excerpted in Issue Fifteen have been cited by the New York Times as Notable Books of 2025. Earlier this year, we spoke with Stephanie Wambugu about her novel Lonely Crowds, from which her Drift piece “Working” is drawn. Now, following our event in collaboration with New Directions celebrating the publication of the third installment of her series On the Calculation of Volume, we are sharing a new Q&A with the Danish author Solvej Balle. Read on for Balle’s reflections on solitude, the Danish literary tradition, and Groundhog Day, and be sure to check out “Day #1144, #1167, #1403” in The Drift.
Can you tell us more about the title, if it’s not a spoiler?
The title was there almost from the beginning. In 1989, when I was in Paris, a friend visited me and saw the small pile of papers marked “On Calculation of Volume.” He said, “If that is your book, you have to change the title.” But it never happened. I did try.
One explanation is that the loop-time creates more of a space, or a room, than the usual view of time as a line or a river, or even a circle. There are several other possibilities. One of them I didn’t realize until Book 6, but I won’t spoil it.
How did you decide on autumn for the novel? What is your favorite month and season?
Autumn came with the idea, somehow — in the beginning, I thought it was the 17th of October, but that didn’t work. Maybe the air is too clear and crisp. There is something wrong about October skies. Tara Selter’s world had to be more rainy. I never thought of the story taking place in the winter. No need for snowmen, I guess. Or in the summer. It wouldn’t work.
My favorite month is probably August. Like for a lot of people, it’s a childhood thing: my birthday month. Memories of ripe plums and sunshine all day.
My favorite season is spring, I think. Or late spring.
How do you think about pacing and “what comes next” when the calendar doesn’t move?
A lot of it comes quite easily once the idea is set into motion. There are things you can and cannot do when the whole narrative around your person is already told. Anything unexpected will have to come from your character. This probably does set a different pace because you don’t have all sorts of surprises suddenly sprung on you. The world is very predictable.
Many have called this story meditative; do any spiritual or religious texts or ideas inform your work?
I don’t think so. I am interested in all sorts of ideas and texts but I can’t point out anything specifically meditative that has informed my work. I don’t really connect the idea of religious texts with anything particularly meditative either. But there is a lot of thinking and wondering and pondering, so in a broader sense — like when philosophers call their works “meditations,”or when we think of carefully directing our attention to something — I think at least the first book can be considered rather meditative.
Volume II ends with the startling moment of recognition that the narrator is no longer alone in her endless day. How did you think about the shift from isolation to a shared loop, and what does companionship allow you to explore that solitude does not?
When working on my first book, which is about a woman on an uninhabited island, I had a feeling of relief when, suddenly, there were other people on the island. To have more people in the room changes the whole choreography of the novel, even though I have very little dialogue, and it’s often indirect. It’s not just the possibility of your characters having conversations — you can have “dialogue” in your head, too — it is a different dance altogether.
How does your own solitude inform your artistic depiction of it?
Most of the scenes of solitude in the first books were written with other people nearby. Some in a house, with my ex working in another room; some in a residency with a group of people.
Experiencing solitude in real life gives you insight into some of the basic human conditions. We have to trust our own experiences; we don’t have anyone else to ask when we are in doubt, and we don’t have to deal with other people’s views, explanations, or opinions.
During my work on the later books, actual solitude was much more important. Without spoiling too much, I can say that quite a few people show up. When I was writing these parts, I used to sing in a local choir, but I had to leave it. There were far too many people and far too many voices to deal with in the book. So for me, solitude became more necessary as there was less solitude in the books.
One of the most touching elements of this book is Tara’s marriage, and her heartbreaking decision to leave her husband behind. The institution of marriage is premised on a certain time horizon, of planning for the future together. How does this endless day allow you to work through questions that interest you about love, marriage, and long-term partnership?
Some people see the different time conditions Tara and Thomas Selter live under as a reflection of the way that people in relationships sometimes drift apart from each other. I think this is one way of seeing it. But there are other times when Tara feels she is getting closer to Thomas. Maybe their relationship feels stronger when they manage to overcome the gap between them. In the beginning, Tara’s and Thomas’s loss of future seemed to make them more aware of each other and the present. But not in the long run.
Do relationships benefit from or suffer from limitations? I like to ask the question, even though I can’t answer it.
Tara animates big questions about consumer waste and resource consumption on the scale of the individual. Most of us grew up in the age of mass recycling and Green parties (and of subsequent disillusionment in them); what elements of this subject did you especially want to explore?
I actually didn’t originally think of exploring this in my book. It is part of my real life, of course, and I am quite concerned about what we are doing to this planet, which we are so lucky to live on. I think that seeped into my book because the book kind of wanted it.
Quite early in my thinking about the book, I knew that things would be consumed and people would get older, even though the day had come to a halt. The environmental questions came out of all this, I think.
When I started writing, a lot of young people had a “no future” feeling. In those days it was about nuclear war and pollution, among other things. I have sometimes thought that this feeling from the eighties has come back, that we tried to replace fear of the future with a new kind of optimism, which went wrong, too.
What drives an obsession with history when the future seems unavailable, as it is to Tara?
She actually claims that she is not interested in history — especially not the history of big political events and big historical figures. She is more interested in things that have fallen out of history and into the present. I’m not quite sure what she means, but it still feels as if she is making sense. I’m probably more interested in history than she is. But I live in another type of time, I guess.
Did you visualize the end of this series, or of any of the individual books, when you began writing?
I thought I had the whole story ready right from the beginning, and I still think the ending will be roughly the same as when I first thought about it.
In the beginning, I never thought of it as a series of books — rather, I considered it to be just one novel — so that was one of the surprises to me. It’s as if more material appeared from inside the idea, or as if all sorts of things fell into the story from outside, or both.
How, if at all, do you situate yourself within the Danish literary tradition?
At the end of the eighties — when I published my first book — I remember people saying that my generation of writers had nothing in common, that our books were so different. The head of the newly started writer’s school found it hard to teach such a bunch of individualists, she said.
A few years later, people began to see some of us as a group of (mainly) women who wrote “anemic short prose.” I found it wonderful finally to be part of a group, anemic or not. Some felt that they were being fenced in and labeled, but I liked it, and I am still very happy with the books I wrote at that time.
I feel very comfortable in the Danish tradition of the so-called short-prose minimalists of the early nineties. This tradition was linked, of course, to others — the nouveau roman in France, and the Norwegian tradition of fragmented novels. Apart from that, I feel an affinity with some of the modernists from the sixties — mainly the women, but also some of the men.
What do you think of the movie Groundhog Day (1993)? What other works about time loops do you like, if any?
I waited a long time before I saw Groundhog Day. In those days I never watched Hollywood movies; I found most things made to entertain rather boring. But I quite liked it when I finally watched it. It felt so different from what I was doing, but fun, and a bit as if someone had helped me by taking some of the roads I should not go down and making a report from their journey.
Later, when I saw Russian Doll, I was very happy because the main character meets another person stuck in the repetition. I had been missing this in other loop stories. I was just planning to watch the first part but ended up watching the whole first season. I remember my son coming out of his room in the middle of the night saying, “Mom, you are binge-watching a series — have you ever done that before?” I hadn’t. Well, never before and not since either. It was fun, but it was also research, of course.
Associate Editor Tarpley Hitt’s book Barbieland is out tomorrow! You can order it now from our Bookshop page, and RSVP for her Wednesday launch event at McNally Jackson. And while you’re shopping, don’t miss our 25%-off holiday sale on subscriptions, issues, and merch.
Solitude is what makes my brain think and create ! Unlike loneliness , this is very contemplative and ethereal! My existence is hollow and solitude embraces me with true companionship !
It cleanses me and purifies my thought and adds purpose to my living even though I know that this existence is wholly meaningless ! As a retired Cardiologist, even literally saving lives left me unimpressed !! Cheers. Venkat.