
On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
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Narrated by:
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Elizabeth Liang
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By:
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Solvej Balle
About this listen
Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.”
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin?
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.
The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.
Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”
©2020, 2024 Solvej Balle; Barbara J. Haveland (P)2024 New Directions Publishing Corp.Listeners also enjoyed...
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A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin, and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River. His son, still a child, sits at the foot of the bed, attentively collecting these final hallucinated words. Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time, and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—have as its source this ultimate paternal legacy?
By: Rodrigo Fresán, and others
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Theory & Practice
- By: Michelle de Kretser
- Narrated by: Melissa Madden Gray
- Length: 4 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.
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Woman in the Moon
- By: Thea von Harbou
- Narrated by: Romy Nordlinger
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Woman in the Moon is a 1928 science fiction novel by the German writer Thea von Harbou. Its German title is Die Frau im Mond, which means "The Woman in the Moon". It is about a fictitious Moon mission. The book was translated into English by Baroness von Hutten and published in 1930 as The Girl in the Moon.
By: Thea von Harbou
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Up the Line
- By: Robert Silverberg
- Narrated by: Basil Langdon
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s 2059 and Jud Elliott—former law clerk and failed Harvard history student—is at loose ends. Having left his previous job out of boredom, he finally takes a position as a Time Courier showing tourists around medieval and ancient Byzantium. Maybe that unfinished Masters degree will come in handy after all … Jud is careful and he (mostly) plays by the rules, not wanting to get on the wrong side of the Time Patrol. But, on one trip up the line, he meets and falls in love with his great-great-multi-great grandmother and suddenly the rules don’t seem as important anymore.
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Excellent Narration
- By Pezzilla on 02-04-25
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Dengue Boy
- A Novel
- By: Michel Nieva
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The protagonist of this story has no understanding of the words winter, cold, or snow because he has never experienced the phenomena they describe. We find ourselves in Victorica, a province of La Pampa, Argentina, some time after 2197–the year in which the last of the Antarctic icecaps melted and an unprecedented climate catastrophe ensued, radically transforming the landscape of the region into a Caribbean Pampas.
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All tell, no show.
- By T. B. Casey on 03-01-25
By: Michel Nieva
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The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you’re filming a park.”
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Can't say it's good
- By Moraz on 12-22-24
By: Aysegül Savas
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Here Beside the Rising Tide
- A Novel
- By: Emily Jane
- Narrated by: Emily Lawrence
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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At age 10, Jenni Farrow and her new best friend, Timmy Caruso, enjoy a glorious summer on Pearl Island filled with fireworks, beach days, and carnival rides (not to mention that strange sea creature they rescue from a tide pool). Then, one late summer day, Timmy disappears. Thirty years later, Jenni—now Jenn Lanaro, best-selling author of the Philipia Bay action-romance series—is desperate to escape the fatigue of her career and her soon-to-be-ex-husband.
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Annoyed Tone
- By Amber Welsh on 03-06-25
By: Emily Jane
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A Crack in Everything
- How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage
- By: Marcus Chown
- Narrated by: Clive Mantle
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A Crack in Everything is the story of how black holes came in from the cold and took cosmic centre stage. As a journalist, Marcus Chown interviews many of the scientists who made the key discoveries, and, as a former physicist, he translates the most esoteric of science into everyday language. The result is a uniquely engaging audiobook that tells one of the great untold stories in modern science.
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Complex science, good narrative
- By David Benjamin on 02-24-25
By: Marcus Chown
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The Prepared
- An EMP Post Apocalypse Prepper Thriller Boxset
- By: Colton Lively, JS Donovan, Clay Wise, and others
- Narrated by: Jess Trepanier, Elizabeth Lagalee, Cheryl May
- Length: 34 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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When an EMP cripples the nation's power grid, lawlessness erupts across the country. Fighting against the chaos, Bailey Smith must rescue her family from the city and bring them to a remote cabin in the West Virginia mountains.
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Just very bad
- By cpd0137 on 01-30-25
By: Colton Lively, and others
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Doctor Faustus
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.
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Literary self flagellation
- By Lipton101 on 02-13-25
By: Thomas Mann
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Bibliophobia
- A Memoir
- By: Sarah Chihaya
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners”. Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland.
By: Sarah Chihaya
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Unconstrained
- A Near-Future Sci-Fi Thriller
- By: Brian Hill
- Narrated by: Joshua Kachnycz
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucas Sinclair, a washed-up hacker, finds an encrypted channel, buried in routine network traffic, that is transferring enormous volumes of data to seemingly random locations. In his enclave, surrounded by aging clusters of tech, Lucas uses a suite of bespoke tools to trace down the origin.
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Great story with top notch narration!
- By Florence E Hudson on 12-16-24
By: Brian Hill
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Blob
- A Love Story
- By: Maggie Su
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Aimless after getting dumped by her boyfriend and dropping out of college, Vi works at the front desk of a hotel where she greets guests, refills cucumber water samovars, and tries to evade her bubbly blond coworker, Rachel. Little does Vi know her life is about to be permanently transformed when she agrees to a night out with Rachel. In the alley outside the bar, Vi discovers a strange blob—a small living creature with beady black eyes.
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really different
- By Jeannie Bench on 02-24-25
By: Maggie Su
What listeners say about On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Severian
- 02-16-25
The Perfect Book
It is speculative ficition at its finest, in a way that it takes its own premise very seriously and wanders about within the limitations it has set for itself. Beautifully performed, masterfully written, to day anything about the plot would take away from the experience. It is, arguably, about the incomprehensible experience of existing in the world... localized in space and time as a single day in recursion. The day repeats itself, over and over, yet some things do change, very subtle changes that retain the third law of thermodynamics. Interestingly, and different from all other Groundhog Day scenarios, the protagonists body retains continuity, scars stay and heal and slowly dissapear; thus, the protagonist ages, even though time stands still, and could also die (unlike characters in all other Groundhog Day stories) so there still a temporal pressure, a tension brought forth by this existential finitude in an infinite loop. It is heartfelt, full of yearning and consternation at the predicament of being unstuck in time, and it questions the implications of this strangeness with philosophical candor and a radical self-honesty. It may not, ultimately, provide any answers, but the questions that it asks are all the more important because of it. It is a book best read (or listened to) in a single sitting, for there is a momentum that builds in the search for answers and a way forward in time even if it is a vector with nowhere to go but back, in an endless loop.
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Overall
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- BBWrighter
- 03-06-25
Engaging story of reliving the day over and over
I liked the whole premise and I liked her writing. I just wanted more of an ending but this is volume 1.
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