
On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
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Narrated by:
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Elizabeth Liang
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By:
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Solvej Balle
About this listen
Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.”
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin?
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.
The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.
Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”
©2020, 2024 Solvej Balle; Barbara J. Haveland (P)2024 New Directions Publishing Corp.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates.
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Resonant Layers
- By Robert C. Ashley on 12-17-23
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
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The Pilgrimage
- By: John Broderick, Colm Toibin - foreword
- Narrated by: Patrick Moy
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Wealthy and devout, Michael and Julia Glynn are the envy of their neighbors and the model Irish Catholic couple, bearing Michael's increasingly painful and crippling arthritis with stoicism. In hope of a miracle, their priest suggests a family pilgrimage to Lourdes. Yet these pious holiday plans are thrown into doubt when anonymous, obscene letters begin to arrive, full of terrible accusations.
By: John Broderick, and others
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Le perfezioni
- By: Vincenzo Latronico
- Narrated by: Francesco Meola
- Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Tutti vorrebbero la vita di Anna e Tom. Un lavoro creativo senza troppi vincoli; un appartamento a Berlino luminoso e pieno di piante; una passione per il cibo e la politica progressista; una relazione aperta alla sperimentazione sessuale, alle serate che finiscono la mattina tardi. Una quotidianità limpida e seducente come una timeline di fotografie scattate con cura. Ma fuori campo cresce un’insoddisfazione profonda quanto difficile da mettere a fuoco. Il lavoro diventa ripetitivo. Gli amici tornano in patria. Il tentativo di impegno politico si spegne in uno slancio generico.
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Audition
- A Novel
- By: Katie Kitamura
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
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Bizarre, reader was annoying
- By Judith ashton on 04-15-25
By: Katie Kitamura
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Time Shelter
- By: Georgi Gospodinov, Angela Rodel - translator
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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“At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who goes unnamed. “In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.
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Great story about memory & forgetting
- By D. on 05-20-23
By: Georgi Gospodinov, and others
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The Children of the Dead
- By: Elfriede Jelinek, Gitta Honegger - translator
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 20 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria's scenic landscape among historic churches and castles. It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe. It is also a mass burial site. Amid the snow-topped peaks and panoramic vistas, ghosts haunt the forest: Edgar Gstranz, a young skier who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, a philosophy student who committed suicide in her bathtub; and Karin Frenzel, a widow who (perhaps) died in a bus accident.
By: Elfriede Jelinek, and others
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Off-White
- By: Astrid Roemer, Lucy Scott - translator, David McKay - translator
- Narrated by: Christel Mutombo
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s 1966 in Suriname, on the Caribbean coast of South America, and the long shadow of colonialism still hangs over the country. Grandma Bee is the proud, cigar-smoking matriarch of the Vanta family, which is an intricate mix of Creole, Maroon, French, Indian, Indigenous, British, and Jewish backgrounds. But Grandma Bee is dying, a cough has settled deep in her lungs. The approaching end has her thinking about the members of her family she’s lost, especially one of her favorite granddaughters, Heli, who has been sent away to the Netherlands because of an affair with her white teacher.
By: Astrid Roemer, and others
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Terrestrial History
- A Novel
- By: Joe Mungo Reed
- Narrated by: Dave Gillies, Lianne Walker
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah's help. Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough—and then things go terribly wrong.
By: Joe Mungo Reed
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Up the Line
- By: Robert Silverberg
- Narrated by: Basil Langdon
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s 2059 and Jud Elliott—former law clerk and failed Harvard history student—is at loose ends. Having left his previous job out of boredom, he finally takes a position as a Time Courier showing tourists around medieval and ancient Byzantium. Maybe that unfinished Masters degree will come in handy after all … Jud is careful and he (mostly) plays by the rules, not wanting to get on the wrong side of the Time Patrol. But, on one trip up the line, he meets and falls in love with his great-great-multi-great grandmother and suddenly the rules don’t seem as important anymore.
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Excellent Narration
- By Pezzilla on 02-04-25
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What I Know About You
- By: Éric Chacour, Pablo Strauss - translator
- Narrated by: Nabil Traboulsi
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In a tight-knit Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek’s entire life is written in advance. He’ll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eye of the family’s strong women, he starts to do just that–until a patient’s son, Ali, enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men’s unsayable relationship sparks a series of events as dramatic as the Six-Day War and assassination of President Anwar Sadat playing out in the background.
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Great story.
- By Amazon Customer on 02-19-25
By: Éric Chacour, and others
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My Documents
- A Novel
- By: Kevin Nguyen
- Narrated by: Kelly Marie Tran
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.
By: Kevin Nguyen
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Woman in the Moon
- By: Thea von Harbou
- Narrated by: Romy Nordlinger
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Woman in the Moon is a 1928 science fiction novel by the German writer Thea von Harbou. Its German title is Die Frau im Mond, which means "The Woman in the Moon". It is about a fictitious Moon mission. The book was translated into English by Baroness von Hutten and published in 1930 as The Girl in the Moon.
By: Thea von Harbou
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The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you’re filming a park.”
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Can't say it's good
- By Moraz on 12-22-24
By: Aysegül Savas
What listeners say about On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Judy A. Masters
- 04-13-25
When time stands still
On the Calculation of Volume 1 is literary Groundhog’s Day. An antique book seller stuck on the same day made me think of the many ways we move through time. A quick study that has left me thinking more than most books.
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- BBWrighter
- 03-06-25
Engaging story of reliving the day over and over
I liked the whole premise and I liked her writing. I just wanted more of an ending but this is volume 1.
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- Severian
- 02-16-25
The Perfect Book
It is speculative ficition at its finest, in a way that it takes its own premise very seriously and wanders about within the limitations it has set for itself. Beautifully performed, masterfully written, to day anything about the plot would take away from the experience. It is, arguably, about the incomprehensible experience of existing in the world... localized in space and time as a single day in recursion. The day repeats itself, over and over, yet some things do change, very subtle changes that retain the third law of thermodynamics. Interestingly, and different from all other Groundhog Day scenarios, the protagonists body retains continuity, scars stay and heal and slowly dissapear; thus, the protagonist ages, even though time stands still, and could also die (unlike characters in all other Groundhog Day stories) so there still a temporal pressure, a tension brought forth by this existential finitude in an infinite loop. It is heartfelt, full of yearning and consternation at the predicament of being unstuck in time, and it questions the implications of this strangeness with philosophical candor and a radical self-honesty. It may not, ultimately, provide any answers, but the questions that it asks are all the more important because of it. It is a book best read (or listened to) in a single sitting, for there is a momentum that builds in the search for answers and a way forward in time even if it is a vector with nowhere to go but back, in an endless loop.
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1 person found this helpful