( 1 ) Balle had already been planning the novel for several years when the iconic time-loop film Groundhog Day was released in 1993. Rather than disappointed, she was relieved: “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice—somebody’s helped me do research and gone in a direction I wasn’t going to go anyway.’”
On The ShelfSolvej Balle on her award-winning series of novels.
On The ShelfSolvej Balle on her award-winning series of novels.
Danish author Solvej Balle is nearing the completion of her seven-book series of slim time-looping novels, On the Calculation of Volume. Its premise, at least on the surface, is simple: Tara Selter, an antiquarian book dealer living in France, finds herself reliving the same day, November 18, starting each day wherever she ended up the day before. What emerges is a mesmerizing account of a woman’s ingenuity and resourcefulness and a profound meditation on the nature of our days and all they contain: relationships, injuries, domestic rituals and the infinite within the finite.
Natasha Stallard: You first had the idea for On the Calculation of Volume in the late 1980s, around the same time your debut novel, Lyrebird, was published.1 How did you feel about the idea during the passing years?
Solvej Balle: Very up and down. I didn’t know if it was a stupid idea, but it somehow kept clinging to me. At the time, there was a lot of talk about the novel being dead. I didn’t feel I could write another one. I also realized that it was going to take me a long time if I started. So I was like, If I go in here, I’m going be stuck. I didn’t want that for a while.
NS: Did you have to prepare to go into the novel?
