On the Calculation of Volume (Book III)
A current of grief and longing runs through the series ... The provisional nature of this society mirrors an improvisatory quality in the books, with their changing casts of characters and fluid metaphors. Balle’s protean impulse—her constant rewiring of thematic attachments—makes our reading experience varied and rich ... It’s a philosophical experiment illuminated by a novelist’s sensuous and humane way of looking.
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Read as a whole, On the Calculation of Volume — the third volume of which recently appeared in English — may be the great modern novel of depression ... As in the first two books, Balle’s sentences have the swelling, mournful plangency of a Max Richter elegy ... In this extraordinary novel, as in our own shattered world, connection alone may be the one thing that endures.
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Throughout the novel, Balle manages to destabilize even the reader’s sense of time ... Balle has proved remarkably adept at filling both her characters’ 'container of time'...and her readers’. Her novel of repetition reveals not a deadening monotony but rather the remarkable richness of each moment. Her spare, attentive prose demonstrates the way careful attention can transform seemingly familiar silences into a lushly textured masterwork of sound.
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