What to do when, downstairs at breakfast in the hotel restaurant, a man’s toast falls to the floor in exactly the same way it did yesterday? And not in a toast-always-falls-butter-and-jam-side-down kind of way, but a brushed-off-the-table-in-the-exact-same-way-and-eliciting-the-exact-same responses-from-the-waiter-and-the-fellow-diners kind of way. The protagonist of Balle’s series of novels – the fourth of seven is set to be released in English translation in April 2026 – is Tara Selter, a woman who finds herself stuck, each and every day, repeating the 18th of November. Works that play with this premise – e.g. Groundhog Day – have to decide certain things about the dynamics of how the stuck one affects what stays the same and what changes each day. Part of the charm of On the Calculation of Volume is that this is uncertain, and Tara is regularly surprised by the unstable rules.  

Sometimes she needs to sleep with things in her bed for them to stick around, sometimes under the bed works too; sometimes food goes bad, sometimes it doesn’t; sometimes the plastic wrapper of a sandwich disappears, sometimes garbage piles up. Food she eats stays eaten though. Tara feels her repeated presence and pressure on the world in this material, ecological way: the café starts to run out of pastries, empty shelves appear in the grocery store where she shops. “I am living in a time that eats the world,” she writes. Is this a politics of scarcity? What does it say that she has to move around to lessen her impact and experience the seasons? What about the piles of garbage she accumulates? How would composting work? In other ways, this is a time of plenty—the earth might run out of food but Tara’s credit card bill never arrives. There is also a concern with materiality in a media sense: digital files and documents don’t survive the night but print-outs do. Tara is mostly outside time but not outside metabolism. It is material – toast, waste, paper – that binds us to the earth and the day.  

-MS