On the Calculation of Volume

Book III

n the mesmerizing third installment of Balle’s “astonishing” septology, On the Calculation of Volume, Tara’s eternal November 18th shifts in an instant: she discovers she is no longer the only one trapped in this unending autumn day. She meets someone who remembers—someone who, like her, understands that the trees’ red and gold will never fade, that winter will not come, and that the calendar’s nineteenth may remain forever out of reach.

Where the first two books charted a solitary drift through suspended time, Book III reintroduces companionship in all its wonder and strangeness. Tara must relearn how to share a world that no longer moves forward, navigating the exhilaration and disorientation of connection within a reality that refuses to change.

Meanwhile, far from the temporal loop, her husband Thomas sits alone in their home in Clarion-sous-Bois, waiting day after day for a wife he believes will return at any moment—unaware that she has slipped into another kind of existence entirely.

Blending poetic reflection with philosophical depth, On the Calculation of Volume probes the most urgent question of our disquieting age: What responsibility does one individual bear toward humanity—toward the keeping of a world that may be on the brink of standing still?

Longlisted for the national book award for translated literature