
On the Calculation of Volume, Book II
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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
Tara Selter’s epic journey through November 18th continues in Book II of the masterly On the Calculation of Volume from one of Scandinavia’s most beloved writers.
The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth.
Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language.
And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara’s own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? “It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.” She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, without a purpose or a place.
Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion—taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages—a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.
©2020, 2024 Solvej Balle, Barbara J. Haveland (P)2025 New Directions Publishing Corp.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humor, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.
By: Deepa Bhasthi - translator, and others
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Desolation Angels
- A Novel
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London.
By: Jack Kerouac
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Exit Zero
- Stories
- By: Marie-Helene Bertino
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Death-shaped entities—with all of their humor and strangeness—haunt the twelve stories in Exit Zero. Vampires, ghost girls, fathers, blank spaces, day-old peaches, and famous paintings all pierce through their world into ours, reminding us to pay attention! and look alive! and offering many other flashes of wisdom from the oracle and author of Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino.
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Kairos
- By: Jenny Erpenbeck
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates.
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Resonant Layers
- By Robert C. Ashley on 12-17-23
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
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The Slip
- By: Lucas Schaefer
- Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Renata Friedman
- Length: 17 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
By: Lucas Schaefer
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Elena Knows
- By: Claudia Piñeiro, Frances Riddle - translator
- Narrated by: Sally Masterson
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.
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Super depressing but extremely well written and narrated
- By Lenny C. Husen on 03-07-24
By: Claudia Piñeiro, and others
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The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Joseph and His Brothers: Book 1
- The Tales of Jacob
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: Mark Elstob
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In this first volume subtitled ‘The Stories of Jacob', Mann begins with a meditative prelude named “Descent into Hell”, which contextualises the story against a variety of historical, mythological, and historical contexts, before moving on to the story of Joseph's father Jacob. The following chapters follow Jacob as we learn of him stealing his brother's birthright, before fleeing to his uncle Laban and his later marriages to Rachel and Leah.
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Beautiful
- By Jewel D. on 05-17-25
By: Thomas Mann
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
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Immaculate Conception
- A Novel
- By: Ling Ling Huang
- Narrated by: Carolyn Kang
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Enka meets Mathilde in art school and is instantly drawn to her. Mathilde makes art that feels truly original, and Enka—trying hard to prove herself in this fiercely competitive world—pours everything into their friendship. But when Mathilde’s fame and success cause her to begin drifting away, Enka becomes desperate to keep her close.
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To future listeners
- By Sofie on 06-18-25
By: Ling Ling Huang
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Beware of Pity
- By: Stefan Zweig
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 14 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a young cavalry officer is invited to a dance at the home of a rich landowner. There - with a small act of attempted charity - he commits a simple faux pas. But from this seemingly insignificant blunder comes a tale of catastrophe arising from kindness and of honour poisoned by self-regard. Beware of Pity has all the intensity and the formidable sense of torment and of character of the very best of Zweig's work. Definitive translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell.
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One of my favorite authors
- By Adeliese Baumann on 03-21-18
By: Stefan Zweig
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The Day of the Triffids
- By: John Wyndham
- Narrated by: Kingsley Ben-Adir
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded eyes, misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. Removing his bandages the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, another lucky person who has retained her sight, and together they leave the city, aware that the safe, familiar world they knew a mere 24 hours before is gone forever. But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world.
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Good story but outstanding narration
- By NULL VOID on 07-29-23
By: John Wyndham
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Lost & Found
- A Memoir
- By: Kathryn Schulz
- Narrated by: Kathryn Schulz
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief.
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Bored to death
- By Amazon Customer on 03-15-22
By: Kathryn Schulz