On the Calculation of Volume (Book VI)

The penultimate installment of Solvej Balle’s “speculative masterwork” (New York) opens on Day #10463: Tara Selter travels to a set of abandoned greenhouses outside Naples to join other time-trapped people who have converged there to grow vegetables. “One must tend one’s own garden,” urged Epicurus (and Voltaire), and Balle elevates this principle of cultivation as a guide for her characters, who have journeyed so far from the people they love and the worlds they once knew. Yet, as they try to focus on the garden, some are beginning to lose hope, struggling to find purpose inside so unfathomable a snare—a trap where, as “time” circles on (having wheeled through more than twenty-eight years of November 18ths), no one is getting any younger and death looms ever larger as the only certain means of escape. (Meanwhile, a splinter set of Tara’s friends, “the papyrus group,” searches nearby for clues in the charred ancient scrolls of Herculaneum.) Exploring grief, neuroscience, loss, atomism, and connection, Solvej Balle takes us even deeper into the graying Tara’s profound mortal conundrum. In Book Six several mysteries threaded through the previous volumes are resolved (the identity of the bicycling bag thief from Book Two, for one) even as new rumors abound (about the Metonites, strange doublings, and an ancient Greek inscription on the Siekilos pillar). In Solvej Balle’s masterful hands, all the narrative spokes of On the Calculation of Volume converge on a hub: the vital hope of a way out of the 18th of November. Tara is poised. Exit is the word.