On The Calculation of Voume I by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J.Haveland (“Maybe there’s healing in sentences.”)

My husband, who is a gardener, notices things like this stone that is wrapped with a rope. In Japan, it has a name, sekimori ishi, and it indicates that a path is closed. Or, that visitors should take a different route.

I find it particularly meaningful in light of the way I placed such a stone in my blog. For a long time, it has been closed. Even now I am hesitant to move the boundary stone, uncertain if I’m ready to head down this blogging path again.

Yet, the requests to review books keep coming in, and more surprising than that, to me, is that my blog stats have not significantly changed since the post I last published. Perhaps there is still an interest in what can be found here…

Although I have not joined the International Booker Prize Shadow Jury this year, for the first time in at least eight years, I have been reading the list on my own. I was reluctant to read it under pressure as there is such little time between the announcement of long list and the winner. Instead, I wanted to take my time before submitting scores, and evaluating each book, with fellow shadow members so that we could arrive at a decision as to our winner. 

This year’s short list is not disappointing. I have read all but one, and I would like to share my thoughts on each as we draw closer to learning which book is the winner on May 20, 2025. Let’s begin with On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. 

The premise is relatively simple; the narrator relives the same day in her life over and over and over for a year. The end.

But, when thinking about it, I find much deeper applications. For example, couldn’t that scenario depict the way that we are stuck in our lives? We don’t know how we got somewhere, and we often don’t know how to escape. Certainly I have felt that I make the same mistakes, repeat the same routine, relive the same sorrows over and over and over.

Most poignant to me is when she speaks of writing, for it is a similar passion of mine:

I am sitting at a table with a pile of paper in front of me on which I have written that it is the 18th of November and that my name is Tara Selter. I feel as if I am no longer alone. As if someone is listening. My days have not been lost to oblivion. They exist. My days exist in my pile of paper, they have not been erased during the night, the paper remembers…Maybe there’s healing in sentences.” (p. 84)

Of course, this will probably not be an aspect of the book on which most readers focus. But, I am fascinated by the power of writing, the power of words, as a shelter in life’s storm. Can you relate?