From loneliness to creating a new society
In the first part of the series, bookseller Tara Selter woke up on November 18th, a day that simply got stuck and left no room for others. However, in the fourth book, the heroine’s isolation ends – the plot takes a completely different pace. In a huge house in Bremen, Tara encounters other “time prisoners” for whom this November day also repeats thousands of times.
Having found each other, the characters are forced to create new rules of existence: how to share resources, how to agree on daily responsibilities, and whether it is possible to open the future in a world where the remaining inhabitants do not even suspect that time has broken?
“We must practice dreaming and turning the world upside down”
Writer Solvej Balle, creating in her home on the island of Ærø, states that this book series speaks an important word about the state of modern man, consumerism, and the climate crisis.
“We must practice dreaming, thinking, and turning the world upside down. If we cannot imagine a different reality, we will remain stuck in the same structures that destroy us,” shares the author her thoughts on the work’s undertones.
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According to S. Balle, literature should not provide hasty answers. Her work is an attempt to talk about huge existential, astrophysical, and neurological questions through language games, attention to detail, and subtle humor. When asked if she herself has found a way out of the endless November 18th, the author mysteriously hints: “It is related to atoms and empty space.”
World critics: “modern classic and hypnotic experience”
Solvej Balle’s book cycle has already been translated into more than 20 languages and is called one of the most inventive phenomena of contemporary European literature:
- The New Yorker describes the author’s style as “hypnotic, precise, and maintaining a special light of everyday life.”
- The Washington Post emphasizes that the book rejects cheap tricks and becomes deep, realistic, and intriguing speculative fiction.
- The Guardian writes that S. Balle turned the idea of a time loop into “an endlessly interesting and deep meditation on love, loneliness, and human consumption.”
- On the Danish literary platform Litteratursiden, it is emphasized that the fourth part poetically breathes fire into our thinking and subtly but sharply raises the question: how to create a new community when the old world has stopped?
Solvej Balle About Volume Calculation Book IV. Translated from Danish by Ieva Toleikytė | Hubris, 2026. – 184 pages | Editor Asta Petraitytė; proofreader Žydrė Švobienė; designer Tom Mrazauskas. Cover illustration by Madara Krēziņa. The book’s publication was supported by the Danish Arts Foundation
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