To get to Aero, the island in the Baltic Sea where the Danish writer Solvej Balle lives, I took a plane, two trains, a ferry and a bus. After landing in Copenhagen in the summer of 2024, I took a train to Svendborg, the southernmost town on the island of Funen, and waited to board the ferry. Groups of teenagers sported the caps that distinguish a recent secondary school graduate. I eventually arrived on Aero and made my way to the town where Balle lives. As my bus wended its way across the island, through fields dotted with churning windmills and past red-shingled cottages, my sense of time slipped. I missed my stop and disembarked on an empty street, past the location where Balle had arranged to pick me up.
A few minutes later, a woman in a black dress, a sweatshirt and sandals came into view, pushing a bicycle with a step-through frame and a basket. As she neared, I glimpsed her red hair tied up in a scrunchie. Balle squinted at me through glasses that seemed of a slightly outdated prescription. “Is it Monday?” she asked, as she grabbed my bag and plopped it into the basket of her bicycle. “I’m not really into these things.” I couldn’t tell if she meant interviews or time itself.
Balle took me to her home for lunch, apologizing in advance for the state it was in. “When the book is a mess, my house is a mess,” she explained. After Balle deposited her bicycle in the garden, we entered through the side door; wallpaper was peeling, revealing an underlying herringbone pattern that Balle wanted to restore, and cabinets lay upended across the floor. Works by her ex-husband Simon Lewis, the British artist, hung next to William Blake’s print of “Laocoön and His Sons” and a drawing by her son, Asmus, of a cheerful, multilimbed alien. A grand piano held sheet music for the theme song for the 1993 film “The Piano”; one bin labeled “Things” sat next to another labeled “And Some Other Things.”
Balle had just finished the fifth book of her seven-part novel, “On the Calculation of Volume.” The novel tells the story of Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller who wakes up one morning to find she is endlessly reliving the same day: the 18th of November. How, the novel asks, might she regain a future? As Selter explores her everlasting present, she confronts the world’s finitude and rediscovers the texture of everyday life.
“Calculation” gestated for more than 30 years before Balle self-published the first volume in 2020 through her own press, Pelagraf. The books amassed a cult following in Denmark and became a sensation across Scandinavia. The first three volumes won the Nordic Council Literature Prize (previously awarded to the Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse) in 2022. The storied American publisher New Directions released the first two volumes (in a translation by Barbara Haveland) in 2024 and will release the third volume (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) on Nov. 18. It has committed to running the entire septology over a four-year period, an unusual expression of faith in a writer who is still in the process of completing her project.
‘Is it Monday? I’m not really into these things.’
The novel has captivated readers in part by elevating its “Groundhog Day”-like premise into a philosophical and existential thriller, and garnered the kind of devotion usually reserved for genre fiction. “Calculation” provides the pleasure of figuring out the rules of an alternate universe that eerily resembles our own. The writer Sloane Crosley, who said she usually did not succumb to the kind of literary fandom associated with “Harry Potter” readers, told me, “I’ve just been that person that’s sort of genuinely wondering: Do I learn Danish so I can read the entire series before they’re all translated?” She likened the experience of reading “Calculation” to that of entering a dollhouse, in which everything seems recognizable but almost imperceptibly off — a feat that could be accomplished only by a writer who knew every crevice of her fictional environment. “It’s like she’s thought of every scenario,” Crosley said, “and when I say that, it’s probably because she’s been thinking about it for 30 years.”
The novelist Hernan Diaz described the novel’s chief appeal as its ability to distill a sense of isolation common to contemporary life. (The first volume came out a few weeks before Denmark went into lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic.) “It has to do with an emotional kind of truth,” Diaz explained: “how lonely we are, how stuck we are, how hard it is for all of us to reach across and touch someone.”
I had expected Balle to be a recluse. To some extent, that’s true — she refuses to fly or drive and rarely leaves the island, even after her novel’s success. But she is also a thoughtful, impish interlocutor who is very much in the world. During our conversations, Balle often spoke in long tangents, jumping from her research into subjects like aesthetic theory to a discussion of the nature of time, as if she had momentarily lost the plot or was testing her interlocutor’s patience.
As Balle cubed cantaloupe and mandolined hard-boiled eggs into a Medici salad, I sensed that Balle had simply decided to live her life at a different pace and from a different vantage point, the better to diagnose our unwillingness both to acknowledge existential threats and to appreciate the quotidian pleasures that they might extinguish.
Balle was born in a small town on Denmark’s Jutland peninsula in 1962. Her father worked as a special-education teacher, her mother as a nurse. Both parents came from poor families, with backgrounds in farming and gardening. They encouraged Balle to read widely but never conceived of writing as a career, which she described to me as “somebody else’s house,” a place she could never fully occupy.
Still, when she was 16, Balle completed a series of short stories, mostly inspired by the lives of her classmates. She locked the manuscripts in a drawer and kept the key hidden in her guitar case but eventually submitted the collection to the publisher Gyldendal, which issued luminaries like Henrik Ibsen and Soren Kierkegaard. They rejected the stories, but encouraged her to keep writing. (A friend found the rejection letter in the publisher’s archive decades later, after Gyldendal went on to publish Balle.)
In 1979, when she was 17, Balle traveled to Paris to work as an au pair and eventually lived as one of the “tumbleweeds” at the legendary bookstore Shakespeare & Company, where she helped out in exchange for a bed on the shop’s second floor. She spent her 20s as an itinerant student, taking classes with the feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva and at the Sorbonne. In 1990, she followed a boyfriend to Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y., where she took classes in the philosophy of language and logic. That same year, she and the boyfriend went on a road trip through the United States and married on a whim while passing through Las Vegas. All the while, she was writing. Her first novel, a retelling of “Robinson Crusoe” titled “Lyrefugl” (“The Lyre Bird”), was published in 1986. It told the story of an island populated by women who were all called variations on the word “Friday,” the name of Crusoe’s faithful servant.
‘It’s like she’s thought of every scenario, and when I say that, it’s probably because she’s been thinking about it for 30 years.’
By 1987, Balle had enrolled in a new writing school in Copenhagen, simply called the Writer’s School. There, she met Christina Hesselholdt, the novelist who would become her close friend and first reader. Together they taught classes at the school, edited a literary magazine called Den Blå Port (The Blue Door), and were part of a new generation of women writers in Denmark. Whereas previous women had published barrier-breaking, confessional work that explored autobiography, Balle’s generation gravitated toward more “objective” or philosophical themes, often in experimental forms that straddled the novel, essay, poetry and short story. They devised a sharp, minimalist style to convey the urgency of the physical, concrete experiences of women’s lives. “In the ’90s, we were quite interested in not using psychology in our writing,” Hesselholdt explained to me. “We were more interested in phenomenology. And a way to avoid psychology was not to work with characters but with ‘containers.’”
Using these containers freed them to study women’s perspectives on the world rather than the content of their lives. Writers like Balle and Hesselholdt asked a simple question: What does the world look like if readers are forced to take feminine experience as a given? Balle remembered studying Hegel and concluding that he had forgotten to think about women. “He had to make a whole story about guys going to war in order to encounter death without having to look at people in childbirth,” she told me. “And I remember sitting in that room and looking at these texts, and I was ready just to put my hand up and say, ‘Why doesn’t he look to the right instead of to the left?’”
Balle has spent her career reconsidering what kinds of perspectives deserve attention. “According to the Law” (1993), her second book, was a compilation of four linked stories that took as their premise different natural laws. In one story, a scientist named Nicholas tries to calculate God’s height while flying over the Arctic Ocean, using the size of imprints left on the frozen surface of the water that he takes to be God’s footprints. It’s a farcical idea, but Balle treats it with all the seriousness of physics. After roughly calculating the size of one of these footprints, Nicholas asserts that “if it were true that man had been created in God’s image then all they needed, in order to calculate God’s size, was a figure representing the ratio between the size of a person’s footprint and their height.” Nicholas removes his shoes and socks, and the reader is treated to a closely narrated series of measurements that determine God’s height to be “211 kilometers.”
The story carries Balle’s hallmark: self-consciously clinical prose, a sharp sense of humor and a skepticism toward the hubris that drives our pursuit of knowledge. At the same time, it carries a touching conviction that human beings carry within themselves the scales to measure the unfathomable — or at least to try to do so, no matter how foolish or fruitless an enterprise.
“According to the Law,” which was translated into more than 10 languages and published in Britain and the United States in 1996, was a success both at home and abroad and became a fixture of Danish secondary school and university classrooms. But having a public profile became too much for Balle. There was a significant amount of expectation that she would follow up with more conceptually weighty fiction; instead, her next book, “Eller” (1998), was a collection of delicate poetic fragments
Her personal life, meanwhile, became turbulent. In 1996, she and her first husband divorced. The next year, she met Lewis at an artist’s residency in Germany, and the year after that, they married. (She also finally received her bachelor’s degree, having pursued it intermittently for 14 years.) The pair returned to Copenhagen together, but left soon afterward. Balle described the decision as primarily financial, given that she and Lewis had begun discussing having a family. In 2002, Balle gave birth to her son, Asmus. Three years later, her family moved to Aero. In the literary world, however, Balle’s absence felt to some like an abdication. “She was the young hope of Danish literature,” as one Danish newspaper put it. “But then Solvej Balle was gone.”
Balle described her first years on the island as a blur as she and Lewis balanced renovating their home and raising their child. Before, Balle worked an average of 80 hours a week; now she ate breakfast on the beach with her family, picked strawberries and made jam, shepherded Asmus to and from day care. A book about aesthetics came out in 2005, then a memoir in 2008. Both went without much notice, and soon, Balle recalls, Gyldendal began pulping Balle’s overstock without informing her. Annoyed, Balle bought back the rights to her work and set up Pelagraf, in 2011. As a teenager, Asmus became her business manager; he would drop off copies of his mother’s books with booksellers by bicycle.
Simultaneously, influenced by experiments in time like James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” Balle was steadily working on what would become “Calculation.” As early as 1987, she had the concept for a novel in which a single day repeats itself. At one point, she wrote a draft and threw it away. But as the years passed, she found herself unable to relinquish the idea. Balle and Lewis divorced, Asmus grew older and eventually Balle had the house to herself. Through all the change, she grew accustomed to living alongside her protagonist, Tara Selter, who runs a rare-book business with her husband, Thomas, from their home in the north of France.
When Tara travels to Paris as part of a book-buying trip, she discovers that “time has fallen apart.” On Nov. 18 in an unspecified year, she wakes up in her hotel room, eats breakfast in the hotel restaurant, gathers a few tomes on subjects including the history of potable water and celestial bodies, visits a numismatist friend specializing in ancient Roman coins and talks to Thomas on the phone before falling asleep. The next day, she notices another hotel guest dropping a slice of bread on the floor in an eerily identical manner to the prior day. Newspapers and receipts display the date as the 18th, and not one of her acquaintances, including Thomas, remembers their conversations from the day before.
‘It has to do with an emotional kind of truth and how lonely we are, how stuck we are, how hard it is for all of us to reach across and touch someone.’
“Calculation” takes the form of a journal, with entries according to the date of Tara’s confinement (a year’s worth by the end of Volume I, more than a thousand by the end of Volume II). Balle’s decades-long grounding in philosophy shapes not only the book’s details but its very framework. A presiding interest in Balle’s writing is what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called the “paradigm shift”: the notion that human knowledge progresses through seismic disruptions that force us to revise our understanding of how reality functions. As Tara documents her investigations with a rigor that approaches the scientific method, her journal entries trace the ways that her new reality is no longer commensurate with the old: Now that she lives across a rift in time from her loved ones, she must rethink everything from how she interacts with her environment to the nature of love and domesticity.
We learn very little of Tara’s background, other than a few details about her childhood and marriage. Instead, the novel pays obsessive attention to the logistics of her experience: What happens to possessions in such a world? To garbage? To money? To our sense of self? The things that Tara purchases have a tendency to disappear overnight, until she discovers that she can sleep with them under her pillow; the items she consumes from the grocery store do not always reappear on the shelves the next day; digital records evaporate overnight. In paying attention to these phenomena, Tara becomes aware of the world in a new way. She quickly realizes, for example, that nothing she eats ever returns. “It was me who made things disappear,” she says. “I am living in a time that eats up the world.” She resorts to scavenging rather than irreversibly consuming resources.
Balle’s language is consistent in its clarity, and also in the way it toggles among modes within the span of a paragraph: attentiveness to physical details and scientific processes, an evocation of memory and a sense of wonder in the face of the ordinary. In one scene, Tara and her husband focus on the most mundane of tasks: the frying of an egg. “We commented on every detail of what was happening, to ensure that we were both focusing on the same thing,” Tara recalls. “We talked about the surprise of childhood eggs with double yolks,” she goes on. “There you were, in the kitchen with your mother or your grandfather, you cracked an egg and, and if it were a particularly large egg, often there would be two yolks in the bowl.”
“Calculation” suggests that the potential for collective experience lies in the minutiae of domestic life. The ramifications are slyly political. Some writers, Balle told me, can “own” the world only because “there’s something they’ve forgotten to look at.” Unlike her Scandinavian colleagues Karl Ove Knausgaard and Jon Fosse — whose own multivolume novels employed a repetitive obsession with the banal to explore their autobiographies or the intricacies of religious transcendence — Balle turns out toward the world, not away from it. In “Calculation,” Tara’s environment is not merely grist for human consciousness. It has its own narrative; Tara is simply a character like any other, no more or less important than the egg she cooks, the skillet she holds or the pillow she sleeps on.
Today, the various editions of “Calculation” have sold more than 170,000 copies worldwide. The first volume of the English edition was longlisted for a National Book Award and shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. (Volume III has been shortlisted for a National Book Award as well.) The success of the books has also brought with it more attention — interview requests, fan mail, opportunities to be celebrated — than Balle has ever received in her career. She has declined most invitations, including attending a ball with the king and queen of Denmark. She considered visiting the United States last fall to celebrate the publication of New Directions’ editions of the first two volumes, but given her aversion to flying, ultimately decided not to go. (She’s still considering an eventual trip by freighter.)
In July, she and I spoke via video call, exactly one year after we first met. She appeared on camera with slightly damp hair; there had been a downpour in her garden. She seemed happy not to have won the Booker Prize; it was like “having been invited to a party but not having to stay and clean the dishes.” Though she was grateful for the expanded readership, the recent recognition had been mostly a distraction for her. Her role as a publisher had fallen by the wayside. She had forgotten to reprint her old volumes, which were now sold out and in demand.
It seemed as if she had built for herself what she did not have before: the kind of refuge that made outside scrutiny irrelevant.
She had also just finished Volume VI, which would soon appear in Danish with a salmon pink cover, in a run of 3,000 copies without an author photo, blurbs or biographical information, distinguished from the previous installments only by a Roman numeral and new color. Work had begun on Volume VII, for which she had already amassed hundreds of pages. “The book has actually taken up all the space in my head,” Balle said. “I think I still had a little bit of my brain left when you were here, and now it’s all gone.”
“Somebody said to me, ‘All of New York is talking about this book,’” Balle added, incredulously. “But in a way, it’s so far away that I don’t have to worry about it, because everything here is the same.” When I asked her what was different between the current round of attention and her previous success in the ’90s, she said simply that she is older now than she was then. But it also seemed as if she had built for herself what she did not have before: the kind of refuge that made outside scrutiny irrelevant.
I asked her what she would do once the septology was finally completed. She didn’t seem wistful about approaching the project’s end, though she did worry that she had set her mind to a puzzle that she wouldn’t be able to solve. Still, after decades of living with Tara, the impending separation seemed potentially bittersweet. “I am actually looking forward to being finished, but then when I start thinking about it, I have this feeling I’m going to miss Tara Selter,” Balle said. And what would Tara think about her?
“Oh, I’m sure that she’s not going to want me around anymore when she’s finished,” she joked. “I think she’ll be very happy to get rid of me.”
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