translation

Deborah by Esther Kreitman

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Esther Kreitman cover in front of bookcase of Virago Modern Classics

For Women in Translation month, I pulled Deborah (1936) by Esther Kreitman, translated from Yiddish by her son, Maurice Carr, in the 1940s. It was a gift from a Virago-loving friend called Alex back in 2020, and it definitely ticking off a language that I’ve never read before.

Deborah is apparently quite autobiographical, following a Rabbi and his family in early-20th-century Poland. Deborah has a brother who teases her, a mother who is apathetic towards her, and a father who is a little lost in lands of unworldliness and more interested in studying scripture than being demonstrative towards his daughter. For a long time, the novel looks at daily life in an insignificant town for a family who are sort of an outlier, socially.

Like so many young heroines in literature, Deborah is spirited, intelligent, and frustrated. She longs for education and for romance, and is offered neither. As a girl, her future is not considered to be worth discussing in comparison to her brother’s – except for marrying her off as suitably as possible. A local sort of matchmaker is forever suggesting possible suitors (each of whom has some sort of catch) and, to do her parents credit, they seem to take her refusals in their stride.

How happy she might have been if only she had been born a boy! It was not without good reason that her father had insisted, way back in Jelhitz, that girls were inferior creatures. Now why on earth could not men and women wear the same clothes? If she was to wear a gaberdine like Michael, then, like him, she could go wherever her fancy took her…

Finances are tight, and Reb Avram Ber (her father) is offered a more prosperous living in Warsaw. Indeed, he is offered the role of Tsadik – something Kreitman never fully explains, but something Reb Avram Ber does not think he can accept. Things go back and forth in some of the novel’s livelier scenes, and the family move to the capital. For Deborah, particularly, it is a totally new world.

“Well, that’s funny! It was only a short journey. And, do you know, I always used to think Warsaw was hundreds of miles away!”

“Yes, that’s just like you! You’re a great thinker, only you always think the wrong thing,” said Michael with a laugh, and Deborah blushed.

What a terribly busy station! And it was all paved with smooth flagstones – just like the description of a big railway station in one of the novels she had been reading. The crowd was seething with excitement – all in a tangle like a swarm of bees. And no one ever stopped, except for a brief instant to snatch a paper from one of the news-vendors. Why all this hurry? Had they all gone mad? Why couldn’t they walk along sensibly like normal people? They were a queer lot!

In this new environment, Deborah manages to get embroiled with a group of Socialists – partly because she is attracted to a young man involved with the movement (Simon) but moreso because she is beguiled by a young woman (Bailka) who is determined, witty and strident – and clearly the sort of person Deborah would like to be. But how can she get away, and start that sort of life?

Deborah learnt to detest her home. She realised only too well that the family had come to look upon her as an hysterical, irrational creature.She began to brood, and her every thought was – how to run away. Young people often left home on account of differences with their parents. When the rift between the old and the new generations became unbridgeable, a parting of the ways was inevitable. That was the course Bailka had taken. But she, Deborah, was not made of the same stuff as Bailka! Now, Baika was a prominent member of the party, but as for herself, she was being spurned by the movement. It was one thing to contemplate action, but another to accomplish it. Anyway, she had nowhere to go, no means of escape.

She spies some chance of escape by marrying the next young man who is suggested to her – but life is equally despondent and unfortunate with him. Her new parents-in-law are unaffectionate and unpredictable. Her husband is a sweet idiot, seemingly incapable of keeping them out of poverty. I found the dynamics of the marriage to be the most interesting part of the novel, and I wish that Kreitman had spent longer on this section. For a novel that is quite slow and steady for the most part, the final 75-100 pages felt a bit rushed – and perhaps a novel about their marriage alone would have felt a bit more focused and a little more satisfying?

Speaking of focused – it’s interesting that the original title was Der Sheydim-Tants (The Dance of the Demons) – and the change in title clearly puts the focus on Deborah. And that does make reading the novel quite strange at the beginning, because we spend rather more time with the Rabbi and his wife than with Deborah, and she doesn’t really emerge as a protagonist until the second half of the book. I did like reading the book, but the choice of title made me feel a bit disoriented, in comparison to the novel I was reading.

Overall, I think it would have been a better novel with a bit more editing and focus – but still an enjoyable read, and valuable to learn more about Jewish lives in Europe before and during the First World War.

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle

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I’ve changed as a person. I’m becoming one of those people who reads sequels/series in relatively quick succession! I started Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series in January, and I’ve made it to the fourth volume – published in Danish in 2022, and in translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell in 2026, making it perfect for Women in Translation Month. (Incidentally, I wonder why the translators have changed since the first volume?) Here are my thoughts on the books in the series so far.

Even though I’ve read the third book as recently as May, I did have to dig around to remember what happened (and found this excellent essay). This review will have spoilers for the other books so far, of course: as a reminder, Tara is an antiquarian book dealer stuck in a timeloop. She is 35, though I’d remembered her being much older. For thousands of days, it has been 18 November. The twist is that she always starts the day wherever she ended the previous one – so, in the course of three books, she has travelled far and wide. Sometimes she returns to her husband, Thomas. Sometimes she visits her parents. The early volumes are beautiful explorations of what it looks like to find contentment alone in a world you can’t change. Then it becomes more claustrophobic. And then more people appeared. Henry, Rolf, and Olga were also trapped in 18 November.

Well, ready yourself. The stream of ‘loopers’ just keeps coming in volume IV – and that terminology is one of the main things that the book explores. What should they call themselves? What should they call the ‘normal’ people? What about names for lengths of time? If the third volume took tangents on history and feminism, the main undercurrent of this one is language and how it forms and changes meaning – which I imagine was particularly tricky for the translators. (I also imagine that ‘noopers’ being the negative of ‘loopers’ works better in the Danish equivalent.)

I started making notes about who the people were – Sonia the doctor; Marlice who also ‘works in the hospital industry’ in the hospital laundry; Rosi the au pair – but I quickly last track. Each is sketched out, and some are more dominant in the story, but their real function seems to be a united swell of people. As Tara reflects towards the end of the book:

Our house has become a reception centre, a gathering place, a meeting point. People arrive alone or in small groups. Some arrive very quietly, as if they have slipped unseen through the back door. Others arrive like peacocks, strutting through the gate and up the driveway as if a red carpet had been rolled out all the way to the front door. Some leap into focus the moment we meet them, and within an ahour, you feel like you know them. Others take longer to emerge from the bakcground, a gradual reveal, and some you barely notice until suddenly they unfold – offering a story, an idea, a gesture, an experience – and all at once, you seen them in colour, brightly lit.

For they are living together in an abandoned building – and people start living in a flat across the road, too. The loopers (if we use that term) are drawn from seeing posters that Tara and her friends put up in the third book, or perhaps by word-of-mouth – because each person takes breaks from the shared community, travelling around, encountering other loopers. The timeloop is no longer something that Tara faces alone. Instead, she is now a small part of a much larger group – and that brings a completely different dynamic to her life and to the novel. Balle captures the amorphousness really well in passages like this:

It is in the way things move. Cutlery and bowls making their way to the table. A hand reaching into a drawer for a handful of spoons, the sound of metal. The drawer sliding shut again. A cupboard opening, a stack of plates balancing in a pair of hands, then other hands bringing cups to the table. A pot of coffee is brought in, then another. Tea, brewed by Sonia, carried to the table by Peter, poured by Rosi, and Henry gets up to fetch milk while I take the empty coffee pot back to the kitchen and return with a full one.

It is this intertwining that makes it feel as though we are a group. The voices in the room, the eyes sweeping the table and the objects migrating from the kitchen to the conservatory. Then someone asks whether Olga is up yet, or whether anyone has seen Peter. Someone answers, or throws out a guess across the table. More questions follow, another scan of the table. Would anyone like more tea, are there any more oranges, and is there anything else I should bring up from the basement? Sentences floating, a voice replying, sometimes several at once. Yes, on the table in the kitchen; or no, she’s still sleeping; or he was here just a moment ago; and then the coffee’s ready, are there enough cups? And new questions come up, followed by comments on the questions and an answer from the other end of the table. We speak into the air over the table and answer on behalf of one another. We check to see whether we’re out of bread, and someone mentions that the lamp in the upstairs bathroom needs a blub, and then someone else remembers seeing a box of old light bulbs in the basement.

The individuals become almost interchangeable. A series that started about the strangeness of becoming unique has now changed into one about finding your place in community – and, in some ways, it is like being from any minority and then finding other like-minded people. At first, you are overjoyed that other people ‘get it’. And then the disparites and disjoints start to show. Just because you have the same experience that differentiates you from the majority doesn’t mean that your perspectives will completely align.

One argument that arises in the novel is the ‘why’ of it all. It’s something Tara didn’t dwell on in the first books, but there are some loopers for whom it is all-encompassing – particularly those who blame themselves. Marlice stole a hospital gown and was caught – is that the reason she was condemned to the loop? Have others made it out of the loop, and they are the weak ones who are stuck? Olga, the teenager from the previous book, gives her take:

The world is not a calm sea where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat, she said. The world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.

She believed our concerns about being at fault were an overestimation of our own abilities. As if we could set the universe in motion, out of commission, put the day on repeat. If we were serious, she couldn’t see why we hadn’t started putting our superpowers to better use by now. If it’s actually possible to defy the laws of nature and the entire universe by stealing a hospital gown, then we’d better get to work.

Of course, this novel is still in Tara’s diary entries – but in volume four she becomes more a documenter than a thinker. She is sharing the backs and forths of the arguments around her, and recedes behind the blur of noise. I missed the more pensive Tara from the first book, where the whole experience was focalised through her eyes and her mind. I can see why Balle has evolved the series, and the neverending flood of loopers definitely makes this book succinct, but it’s my least favourite so far. Which isn’t to say it’s bad – I still really enjoyed it – but it didn’t have quite the beauty and magic that made me fall for the first one.

Having said that… there is another twist towards the end that has made me very excited to read the fifth one, translated in November! Watch this space.

A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi – #ABookADayInMay – Day 25

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Holding up A Bookshop in Algiers in the garden on a summer afternoon

The heatwave continues, and I spent some time in the garden reading A Bookshop in Algiers (2017) by Kaouther Adimi. It was originally published as Nos richesses and translated by Chris Andrews as Our Riches, so I’m not sure why the title changed when it appeared in the UK – but I have to admit that ‘bookshop’ in the title is what made me pick it up in a secondhand bookshop a few years ago. So perhaps the marketing folk know what they’re doing.

The novella is about Edmond Charlot, a publisher and bookseller in Algiers, Algeria. As I kept reading the book, and seeing so many real French authors, I began to wonder if Charlot were a real person… and of course he is. Which does raise the issue of novels about real people – particular in Adimi’s case, where she tells his story through diary entries. Making up a real person’s diary is a minefield, but I went along for the ride. Perhaps it helps that the entries are so short.

Through Charlot’s perspective, we see his ambition to open up a bookshop and cultural meeting point in Algiers, called Les Vraies Richesses, and to start publishing some of the greatest names in French literature. He is apparently best known for his working relationship with Albert Camus, and there were other names that I recognised – Giono, Vercors, Gide, Saint-Exupéry – as well as many that are doubtless familiar to people with a better knowledge of Francophone literature than I. He appears to have spent some time in prison, thanks to Gertrude Stein…

March 17, 1942
Just out of prison. A month inside! Thanks to Gertrude Stein who had the bright idea of declaring, in an interview with the BBC: “I have a very dynamic publisher in Algiers, who is resisting…” Vichy already had me under surveillance. Three days after the book was printed, the police came for me in the small hours of the morning.

[…]

This unfortunate episode has held up the publication of Gerturde Stein’s book, but the store stayed open, thanks to Manon and other friends. it’s clearer than ever to me that without friendship there could be no Éditions Charlot. It all depends, essentially, on circumstances, friendship, and encounters.

Before each section of diary entries, there is a page or two summarising the state of Algeria in the time period – from the 1930s through to the 1960s. Now, if I am ignorant about French writing, that’s nothing to my ignorance about the geopolitics of Algeria through the 20th century. In Adimi’s hands, I feel like I’ve had a quick but first-class education. She wears her knowledge and research lightly, and perhaps it’s because we see all these famous names and big events through the eyes of one individual, who is as preoccupied with rude letters and paper shortages as he is with the world stage. Later in the novella, there is an astonishing section on a brutal episode I had never heard of – the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961, by police. It is related with a fierce poeticism, and is incredibly striking.

The parallel story is in 2017. Through a friend of his father’s, a young man called Ryad is hired to throw away everything left in Les Vraies Richesses, paint the walls, and get it ready to be turned into a shop selling beignets. Though it hasn’t been a bookshop for years, it is still a members’ library, and its final custodian, Abdullah, is living next door. Ryad doesn’t like books at all – the idea of print reminds him of mites – and he is not at all uneasy about his task. But he finds the community are friendly but unhelpful. There is allegedly no paint to be bought in the whole region.

Over his time there, Ryad gets to know Adbullah and other locals. Adimi is too subtle to make him have a Damascan Road turn towards literature, but there is a subtle transformation to him nonetheless. Perhaps it’s because of my well-documented suspicion of historical fiction, but it was the contemporary Ryad scenes that I most enjoyed. He is not your usual literary hero, but I warmed to him and his gradual development.

Despite, as I say, not loving historical fiction, and despite some queries about making up the diaries of a real person – I did really enjoy reading A Bookshop in Algiers. It is quietly powerful about the abuse faced by Algerians over the years, as well as a fascinating insight into a literary circle and the resilience of people who simply love literature. It is not a sentimental book, and it is all the better for that. A lovely way to spend a sunny evening, and perhaps the beginnings of an education about a country and culture I know very little about.

They by Helle Helle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 24

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A copy of They in a sunlit park

The UK has entered something of a heatwave, and I read They (2018) by Helle Helle entirely outside, in a couple of different parks in Oxford. It was originally in Danish, and translated by Martin Aitken – the first time, in fact, that I remember seeing the translator’s name on the cover.

I bought They earlier this year with a voucher from some friends for Caper, an excellent little bookshop in East Oxford, having been beguiled by a review in the Guardian. It’s about a 16-year-old girl and her mother (both unnamed) living in a small Danish community. We don’t know what happened to the father, and we don’t know all that much about the two figures – known usually as ‘she’ or ‘her’ and ‘her mother’. Instead, we are just immersed in the ordinary world they live together, with the only clue of instability being the number of previous houses they have lived in. Some of the short sections deal with previous homes, and we usually don’t know quite why they have been so temporary.

The girl has the same preoccupations of most 16-year-olds. Her school, her friends, including a new one called Tove who is a little wilder and exciting than the ones she is used to. There are her older friends, some boys who are starting to intrigue her, and the neighbourly people she bumps into each day. But most of all there is her mother. They are close with an unspoken intensity. In less subtle hands than Helle’s, we might know if this is an unhealthily close relationship – but she just shows it to us, without judgement.

The story is mundane, every day, with little to disturb the calm surface of their lives. Except the mother keeps getting tired. And then, in the midst of the relentlessly ordinary, is a phone call from the hospital, where the daughter uses impersonation to get the information she correctly thinks she’s being shielded from.

Then the telephone rings, it’s the nurse, she’s Swedish or Norwegian. She speaks clearly but considerately. She reads aloud from the patient file. The patient expresses great surprise at the severity of her illness. Her mother bounds into the living room with two potatoes. She finds a telephone conversation taking place and beats a quiet retreat. Now the music changes, again her mother sings along. The doctors can relieve the symptoms, but the condition can’t be cured. Her school bag is dumped on the floor, she sits in front of it with her back to the rest of the room. Six months, perhaps a year. The dinner’s ready, they can eat now. They eat now.

A rock has been thrown into that pool – but not into the narrative. Helle’s prose continues as slowly, calmly as before. The mother has to stay in hospital, and the girl distracts herself with baking and housework. This is not a novel with heart-to-hearts or emotional outbursts. It is quiet and tender.

I’ll be honest. For the first 50 pages or so, I wasn’t sure about They. To be frank, I found it boring. The voice didn’t feel quite as distinctive as I’d hoped – but which I mean that it didn’t have the oddness or off-kilter elements that might make Helle’s prose stand out. But, as I kept reading, and as the prose washed over me, I succumbed. I got into the rhythm of the writing, and started to understand what made it special. Ultimately, They won me over. It took a bit of time for me to connect with it, but once I had, I appreciated the gentleness, everydayness of it.

It was also one where I wish I could compare the translation with the original. There were some moments where the English didn’t quite make sense – a ‘goes’ that should have been ‘went’; a ‘since’ which should have been ‘in case’ – but I assume these discordances were in the original? Maybe?

Apparently it is the first of a trilogy, with the other two books focusing on one of this novel’s background characters. I can see myself going back another time, and hoping for that same connection to appear, once I let the novel take me over.

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig – #ABookADayInMay – Day 19

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It is appropriate that I follow a book by a translator with a book in translation. Queen by Birgitta Trotzig was published in Swedish in 1964 and has just been published in a translation by Saskia Vogel by Faber & Faber, who sent me a review copy. I am always interested in reading more Scandinavian literary fiction, and its description as a ‘haunting Swedish family saga’ won me over.

It’s very different from most novels I read. There is almost no dialogue in the whole book – I thought there would be none at all, but there are four or five exchanges throughout the book. Instead, it is all narrative, and often for page-long paragraphs. It is a poetic, atmospheric depiction of a melancholy family in a rural community. Judit is also known as ‘Queen’, which is a part of her personality that often wars with the more sombre, even hopeless, part of her that is ‘Judit’. She has a taciturn brother, Albert, and a much younger brother, Viktor. At length, Trotzig depicts the dysfunction of this family unit, who scarcely communicate or connect with each other. This is a paragraph about the relationship between Judit and Viktor:

And she sensed how she was being left alone. As young as he was he had made himself unreachable, slick and smooth like a sea-glazed stone, no longer to be grasped. Gray sky, black nettles, chicken scratch, the cat upon the rat, down among the meadows the gray expanse of sea – what did she have to do with this whole world? Alone were they, each and every one unto themself, like cast stones scattered in the empty water-dawn.

It’s beautiful writing, but I have to admit to feeling a bit oppressed by the amount of beautiful writing in this book. Obviously it was a choice to keep the characters’ voices from us, but the lack of dialogue did make the family seem cold and remote from the reader, as well as each other.

In the final 40 pages, a new character arrives – she is foretold by the blurb, but I shan’t spoil it – and it could have been transformative. And yet she, too, is curiously distant from us all. Even a sudden burst of plot couldn’t change that.

So I’m not sure I’m necessarily the right reader for Queen. I could tell it was beautiful, but I couldn’t connect with it. Perhaps that was the point… and yet it felt like a book I couldn’t really get to grips with.

On the Calculation of Volume (vol.3) by Solvej Balle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 16

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is personal growth. I’m actually reading a series without gaps of years between the books! I wrote about the second volume in Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series only a few weeks ago, and now I’ve finished the third (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell). As you might expect, this review will contain pretty significant spoilers for the first two books, though I’ll try not to give too many twists and turns away from the third.

As a quick reminder, if you’re new to this series – Tara is stuck in a timeloop. It is endlessly 18 November. She has lived through several years of this now, and no longer truly believes that 19 November is possibly on the horizon. The first book was about finding peace and space in this timeloop; the second was about claustrophobia and exploration. And the third… well, the second book ended with a big reveal. And this is a major spoiler for the first two books. The big twist is… it turns out Tara is not alone in her timeloop! Another person has been living the same circular existence as her, for the same length of time. His name is Henry Dale.

There are several long entries in this volume, explaining how they first encountered each other in a lecture theatre – where, even before they knew for certain that the other was an anomaly in the loop, they recognised something distinct about each other. Even though they are strangers, this shared strangeness is, of course, soemthing that brings them together intimately.

The thought of our meeting makes me smile now, and it occurs to me how long I’ve lived without this mutual recognition, the little mental jolt, a faint quiver in the brain as you recognize someone who recognizes you back. A sensation that had been absent for so long it came as a surprise: a peculiar new feeling which launched us into an odd little dance.

I am back in the apartment on Wiesenweg, alone now that we’ve parted ways, but still astonished that it’s possible for two people to share a common history in the midst of the eighteenth of November, a very brief history, but a history all the same, of meetings and goodbyes and reunions and plans to meet again.

It is surprisingly plain sailing for a long time. They live through dozens and dozens of days together – moving around, eating and talking and sharing their experiences. Henry has a young son in America, and has spent many of his days there – each day, doing an impromptu visit to his ex-wife and asking to spend the afternoon with his son. (As a reminder, they always start a day wherever they ended the previous one, so travel is possible.) Tara has spent years honing her own philosophy and approach to the extraordinary world she has found herself in, and it is understandably confronting to have to accommodate someone else’s. A blessing, but also a jolt to the rhythm she has established.

A world had opened up, and it was not all to the good; we were in some strange way bound together. There was a promise of more conversations, but not only that. There is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibilities for their baggage.

Because there are so many volumes, Balle can be spacious in how she describes this world. There is time for tangents – about Romans and their obsession with grain, about historians and ‘female history’ and a dispute about whether such a thing exists separately from man’s. For a long while, the two separate – Tara goes back to her husband, and has less success with him than she did in the first book. And she continues to age. She is years older than when the story started, while the world remains the same, over and over. I imagine that will become increasingly a plot point. How can she continue to visit Thomas when, in his eyes, his wife will have aged significantly overnight?

I shan’t say more about what happens in this volume, but the world has certainly opened up more than I anticipated at the outset. I never really worried that Balle would run out of steam, because she writes so beautifully and engagingly about the utterly mundane and thus could never exhaust her material. But I love the direction the series is heading in, and the distinctive nature she manages to give each book – even while the same day repeats itself time and again. I think the first book remains my favourite of the three, but they are all triumphs, and I’m excited to get onto the third.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri – #ABookADayInMay – Day 9

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I absolutely loved the short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, and naturally was keen to try more by her. It’s taken a while, but today I read Whereabouts – first published in Italian in 2018, and translated by the author in 2021. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel translated by its author before, and it all adds to Lahiri’s exceptional talent.

This novel – as so often in May, I am tempted to add ‘novella?’ as a qualifier – is about an unnamed woman in her mid-40s walking through a city. That is almost the whole plot. The story describes many different days, rather than one, but it is like an eternal moment – whether passing a shop that used to house her favourite stationery store, visiting her grieving mother, or struggling to leave the hosue, we are in a sort of everyday always. There is a sense that her life is unchanging, but she is not trapped, exactly. She is too caught up in observing everything and everyone. It’s one of several ways the book reminded me of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. They share the same gentle rhythm, and the same peaceful interaction of a woman with surroundings that she is somehow both subsumed by and separate from. As Ali wrote in her perceptive review, she experiences belonging and isolation simultaneously.

Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well. It’s probably my mother’s influence. She’s always been afraid of being alone and now her life as an old woman torments her, so much that when I call to ask how she’s doing, she just says, I’m very alone. She says she misses having amusing and surprising experiences, this even though she has lots of friends who love her, and a social life far more complicated and lively than mine. The last time I went to visit her, for example, the phone kept ringing. And yet she’s always on edge. I’m not sure why. She’s burdened by the passage of time.

We don’t learn much about the woman’s mother, except for a handful of her stronger emotions and the way she impacts her daughter’s life. But, to be honest, we don’t learn that much about the central character. This didn’t feel like a character portrait, to me – rather, it is a portrait of an experience. Of a city, but really of experiencing a city. Along the way there are snapshots – a daughter refusing to stay the night with her single father; friends rummaging through luggage in the shop that used to sell stationery; an argument at a dinner party. They are brushstrokes coming together to create a single image.

I very much enjoyed reading Whereabouts because it is beautiful, poetic, dreamy. It felt quite different from Interpreter of Maladies, which had sharp details and a depth of insight into the relationship between pairs of people. This was much more impressionistic. Both are done very well – I probably prefer Interpreter of Maladies and the sharp style she has there, but it really depends what you’re in the mood for. Being able t

On the Calculation of Volume (vol.2) by Solvej Balle

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cover of On the Calculation of Volume vol.2 showing a falling vase of yellow flowers

Back in January, I raved about the first volume of Solvej Balle’s seven-part On the Calculation of Volume, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. Uncharacteristically, it has only taken me a handful of months to read the second – and I have the third and fourth on my tbr piles, so watch this space.

If you’re catching up, the series is about Tara Selter, a dealer in antiquarian books with her husband Thomas, who is stuck in a timeloop. Every day is the eighteenth of November. Every day, everyone else is doing the same thing – with a twist on the usual conceit, in that Tara starts the day wherever she ended the previous one. She is stuck in time, but not in space. And she can keep some things that she has near her – but the food she eats one day has disappeared from the world by its next iteration, so she is in danger of wiping out restaurants’ stock. The mechanics aren’t the main thing, but Balle has clearly thought about them.

If the first book had a curious optimism, with Tara finding space and peace in a trope that is usually about power battles and struggles, then the optimism has ebbed a little by the second one. She spends some time with her parents towards the beginning of the novel (like Thomas in the first, they believe her account without any doubts, which goes to show what a trustworthy person Tara is) but, besides this, is largely alone. Or, rather, separated from people she knows. She is always surrounded by people, but they do not think about her and her predicament.

I am surrounded by people in motion. Suddenly they are all walking in the same direction. I look around me and, sure enough, there is a metro station and that is where they are headed. There are lines of people pointing towards the way down. I am outside of the lines. If I get too close to their lines I am in the way. I am a foreign body, an error. I am Tara Selter, lost in the eighteenth of November. Not lost and forsaken, just lost. I have simply fallen out of the world. I have not been hurt in the fall, I got up and brushed a little grit off my knee, that is all.

Having passed a full year of 18 Novembers, Tara is feeling the claustrophobia of her experience. She lives in a hotel for a long time – asking for a room that hasn’t been slept in for a while, with the excuse that she is allergic to cleaning supplies, so that she doesn’t wake up in bed with somebody else the next morning. Even a fire alarm doesn’t rock her from her feelings of stasis.

A few days ago I would have jumped to my feet, scenting change, but I just sat there with my half-eaten sandwich and did nothing and the sandwich is still lying here on the table next to me, not because it was left in haste due to an evacuation, but because it is a bit dry round the edges. I no longer believe in variation, I don’t look for differences and not even a fire alarm can alter my expectations of a day that comes round again and again.

Since she cannot experience variety in time, she decides to go hunting for variety in weather. A lot of this volume is about Tara travelling in pursuit of spring, summer, autumn and winter on this eternal 18 November. For some reason, she never considers travelling to the southern hemisphere or, indeed, outside of Europe, where she could find these seasons more authentically. Perhaps it’s to do with allowances on her passport, or shorter journey times. If you are willing to swallow the idea that she can find springlike weather in a November London day, then you can enjoy her travels. More than the actual climates she finds, it is about her longing and her purpose. When a strange twist of fate has stopped her achieving any of the normal things that give people the reason to keep going, she has found a different reason.

Now I cannot get enough of winter. It is not enough that it resembles winter as I know it. I cannot content myself with snow that doesn’t last, a light sprinkling. I am searching for the heart of winter, consummate winter, concentrated winter. I travel through mountains, I move upwards, northwards and along narrow roads where the snow has already settled as if it means to stay. I gaze at the landscape and write names in my notebook. Place after place. Name after name. I make a note of streets and restaurants. I write the addresses of empty houses and recipes for winter dishes in my book.

Overall, book two sees Tara trying to assess her role in the world a bit more than in book one. It goes through a longer time period – two years of November eighteenths, compared to one – but there is perhaps less plot. The biggest story point is when somebody steals her bag. She struggles through the tedium and self-analysis into something approaching peace – a peace that seemed to come more naturally in the first book, and is more hard-won in this one.

And it continues to be a beautiful reading experience. Balle’s writing is gentle, rhythmic, unshowy and mesmerising.

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I don’t know how one can grow used to a situation like this, but that is what is happening. Perhaps it is the case that you can accept a lot as long as you are spared most of life’s worries. If you are not in danger. If it is a life with no drama, with no poverty or diseaee or natural disasters. I am safe, I have nothing to fear, none of the things one has learned to fear: the calamities and catastrophes of real life – loss, betrayal and crime.

My disasters are little ones and my accidents are fleeting: a minor burn, a twisted ankle, a car crash averted by a braking system. The greatest crime I have experienced is the theft of my bag, a crime perpetuated by a football fan on a rattly bike. The only things I have lost, apart from the passage of time, are a bundle of euros, an olive-green, cloth-bound notebook and two sets of keys. I have what I need. I don’t starve. I can buy whatever I want. I can go back to Thomas and slip into his pattern. He is still alive. I am sure that he is still there, in his house in Clarion. In his pattern, I have suffered no loss, I have not been betrayed, rejected, forsaken. Nothing has happened that one might fear. Nothing fearful.

I could read many more books of writing this striking – and thank goodness I get the chance two. Volume 2 ends on something that is quite shocking, given the lack of twists and turns so far – and I can’t wait to see how this new information is explored in the third volume.

On The Calculation of Volume (vol.1) by Solvej Balle

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On the Calculation of Volume cover

The first book I finished this year could well be a candidate for my Best Books of 2026. Wonderful to be off to a strong start!

I’m definitely behind the curve, so forgive me if you already know all about this book – in 2024, I saw so many people writing about On The Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, published in 2020 and translated from Danish by Barbara Haveland. It is going to be a seven-volume series, with six published in Danish and three out so far in English. And all of those seven volumes take place in one day.

Fear not, this is not a Ulysses-style novel where a single day is stretched out across thousands of pages. Because while all the action takes place on 18 November, there are many different days: Tara Selter, our narrator, is stuck in a timeloop.

Balle makes the decision not to start the novel with the first loop. Ever since Groundhog Day, we are used to watching or reading the protagonist struggle through the initial confusion – staggering through all the stages of grief, really, from disbelief to bargaining to despair. It is so apt for the tone of On the Calculation of Volume that we start on day 121. The first sentence could be chilling – ‘There is someone in the house’ – but we quickly learn that it is simply Tara’s husband, Thomas, doing his daily rounds of boiling a kettle, finding tea leaves, making a cup of tea. Every day, she lies awake in the spare bedroom, hearing the normality of his routine.

We do, of course, learn more about the initial whirr of the timeloop. The confusion, when Tara wakes up on 18 November when it should be 19 November. The various attempts to break out of the trap, and the repeated explanations she makes to her husband each day. But there is something peaceful and calm about this opening that seeps through the whole of the novel. This is not a woman in a state of panic.

I have an hour and a half in the house before Thomas gets back. I have time to have a bath or wash some clothes in the sink, I have time to take a book from the shelf and sit down with it in one of the armchairs by the window.

If I spend the time in the living room, I usually listen to music or read until it starts to get dark, but today I am staying in here, in the room overlooking the garden and the woodpile. I heard Thomas take his coat off the peg and I heard him leave the house. I opened the door into the hall, the packages are gone from the floor, and now I am sitting at the table by the window. It is the eighteenth of November. I am becoming used to that thought.

I am not the first to say it, but what makes On the Calculation of Volume so special is Balle’s resolutely feminist, domestic take on the strange, quirky genre of the timeloop novel. In some many examples, the device is used in a fable of power. The hero is trapped, and must escape. The hero might even be hunted without the timeloop, trying to avoid a murderer. He might be facing an ethical bargain with some unseen arbiter of the timeloop – if only he makes the right decisions, he can reassert dominance over time.

But not here. Tara is, it seems, at peace. Her marriage is loving, a meeting of minds – and, indeed, business partners, running a rare books company together. And there are elements of the timeloop device that seem to cater to this calmness. Tara does not restart each day in the Paris hotel room where she initially awoke on 18 November – rather, she begins wherever she ended the previous iteration of 18 November. For weeks, she does this in bed with Thomas, and has to start each day with an explanation (which, incidentally, is always believed). By Day 121, she has decided to live in a kind of isolation in the spare room. Later in the novel, she tries other forms of created domesticity.

Unlike so often in the genre, it never feels like Tara is at war with the timeloop. Rather, she is finding space within it. This a rich, beautiful novel that celebrates and inhabits the domestic on every page.

I don’t think it was an act of will, but slowly and almost imperceptibly I managed to extend my sense of neutral, indefinite morning. I concentrated it, intensified that pale-gray awakening and with each morning I found it possible to carry that sensation with me further into the day. After only a few mornings I could hold onto the moment long enough for it to encompass everything in the room around me: the bed linens and Thomas’s body beside me, the wall behind the bed and the wardrobe on the other side of the room, a chair with clothes on it, the morning light, the faint sound of a chimney flue door rattling in the wind. These are familiar sounds and sensations and it is still an ordinary morning, it is spacious and open, and I lie in bed while fragments of the world drift in and dissolve: a brief riff of birdsong, a blackbird defying the gray skies or a robin singing into a pause in the rain, three or four notes to start with, then six or seven, then eight, and each one as it burst forth dissolving in my fog.

I keep using similar words – domestic, calm, peaceful, beautiful – and these are the things that make On the Calculation of Volume so special. What Balle has achieved in one book is extraordinary. I bought the second as soon as I finished the first, and I will join the throngs eagerly awaiting the books appearing in English. An unusual masterpiece.

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg

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For my second and final entry to this year’s Women in Translation month, I’ve read The Dry Heart (1947) by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Frances Frenaye. I’ve read and loved a handful of the short Ginzburg books that Daunt are diligently republishing, so opened it up with high hopes – and immediately encountered this striking opening paragraph:

“Tell me the truth,” I said.

“What truth?” he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook and now he showed me what is was: a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a hankerchief.

I shot him between the eyes.

Gosh! Well, if that doesn’t draw you in, then what will? Most of the novella is then told in flashback, with occasional returns to ‘present day’ and the aftermath of this shooting. It’s not my favourite structure for a novel usually, as I find putting the entire story in flashback often deadens it – but it worked well in The Dry Heart.

As so often, it wasn’t until writing this review that I realised that the narrator is unnamed. (Do others notice this while they’re reading? I never seem to.) She is an emotional, hopeful woman who becomes a little obsessed with an older man she sees at the theatre – a man we later learn is called Alberto. When he’s present, she can’t quite understand why she is so fixated on him: he isn’t especially attractive or charismatic, and seems rather diffident and unwilling to develop anything approaching an emotional connection. But when he isn’t there, the narrator can’t stop picturing their future life together.

Alberto doesn’t try to disguise that he is in love with another woman – but she is married. He has determined on singleness, since he can’t have her, but – with those cards on the table – is willing to propose.

When Alberto asked me to marry him I said yes. I asked him how he expected to live with me if he was in love with somebody else, and he said that if I loved him very much and was very brave we might make out very well together. Plenty of marriages are like that, he said, because it’s very unusual for both partners to love each other the same way. I wanted to know a lot more about his feelings for me, but I couldn’t talk to him for long about anything important because it bored him to try to get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over the way I did. When I began to speak of the woman he loved and to ask if he still went to see her, his eyes dimmed and his voice became tired and faraway and he said that she was a bad woman, that she had caused him a great deal of pain and he didn’t want to be reminded of her.

If you’re not familiar with Ginzburg’s writing, this is a good indication – she writes fairly plain prose, and uses it to crystallise emotions and emotional miscommunication in a simple way. It works very well, getting to the heart (pun not intended) of any scene with the directness of an arrow.

As the story progresses, we already know the ending – and we can guess how we might end up there (and learn pretty soon that, yes, Alberto is having an affair with the woman he’s in love with). But Ginzburg does a couple of more subtle things with this premise. One is the significance of the drawing, and the drawings that Alberto does as the story progresses – and the other is the scene in which the narrator and the woman Alberto loves meet each other. I think that’s the strongest moment in the story, overturning expectations.

Perhaps, also, it’s the scene I found most interesting because of the relationship between the two women: rivals, but both vulnerable, neither getting what they want from the situation or from their lives. And, as a complementary point, the reason I didn’t love The Dry Heart as much as the other Ginzburg novellas I’ve read is a matter of personal taste: I find stories of romantic couples much less interesting than the other sorts of relationships that Ginzburg has centred narratives around, particularly parent/child.

Perhaps that’s because narrative art of the past few centuries has been so obsessed with romantic love that it is refreshing to find somebody (especially somebody of Ginzburg’s talent) turn an equal attention to one of the many other fundamental relationships that make up our lives. So The Dry Heart is doubtless just as good as the other books I’ve read by her – but didn’t captivate me in quite the same way.