Issue 112: Technical brilliance vs. emotional connection

On The Calculation Of Volume, v1 + Bibliophobia + trying to figure out what makes a book unforgettable

The morning I finished Solvej Balle's On The Calculation of Volume v.1, I ordered the second volume immediately. This was not an act of enthusiasm. It was closer to desperation, perhaps denial. I needed to believe that what failed to move me in the first book might be redeemed by the second. If I kept reading, I thought, maybe I would find the missing piece—the part that would make the novel matter to me. This is what we do now: consume in sequence, expecting resolution.

Balle's novel—the first in a septology that has garnered awards in Denmark and cultivated devotees worldwide—introduces Tara Selter, an antique bookseller specializing in illustrated volumes. In Paris for a professional conference, away from the husband who manages their shared business in her absence, she wakes on November 18 to discover she has lived this day before. And so it continues—observing, understanding, attempting to intercept this temporal distortion. The premise is familiar: a Danish Groundhog Day stripped of comedy, leaving only the relentless mechanism of repetition.

A still from Groundhog Day.

What Balle achieves technically is undeniable. A narrative that repeats itself without becoming entirely tedious requires skill. The prose is controlled, precise, the observations acute. She constructs a meditation on the circularity of ordinary life, the insignificance of a single human existence, the gravitational pull of long-term relationships, the microscopic nature of love, the way we memorize the breathing patterns of those we sleep beside. It is a novel of mastery—but not of feeling.

I felt nothing.

Ten pages before the volume’s finale, Tara is still wondering:

But what constitutes a difference? Is it a sound? A smell? Is it a color or a shape? Is it green or blue? How small is my difference? Is it an incident, an action? Will something unexpected suddenly happen? Something notable or extraordinary Will it be something perfectly normal and quite commonplace? Or will it be something that doesn’t happen? Something missing? A disappearance?

The questions pile up, yet no urgency gathers behind them. They do not reveal character, only process. Instead of feeling Tara’s disorientation, I only register her logic. Tara has been caught in a time loop for over a year—shouldn’t she, by this point, be haunted by her own existence? Instead, she is still cataloging.

And the only chuckle the book did get out of me is further down the same page:

I wait, prepare myself for when the moment comes, and until then: patience, patience, patience.

Which is exactly what I prayed for as I read.

I appreciate experimental structures, stylistic innovation, the interior landscape of a thinking woman. On paper, this book belongs in my collection. Its ingredients—existential repetition, psychological depth, the slow burn of time—are ones I usually love. The failure to connect, then, becomes a kind of personal crisis, but not for the reason I first assumed. The problem isn’t that I lacked patience or that I failed to meet the book on its terms. The problem is that it never reached back.

After finishing Balle, I read Sarah Chihaya's Bibliophobia, a memoir of reading and writing that provided unexpected context for my resistance. Reading Chihaya felt like consulting WebMD only to discover symptoms of conditions I hadn't known existed. The distinction between bibliophilia and bibliophobia suddenly seemed less clear. To love books is not always to enjoy them, just as to finish a book is not always to be moved by it. Reading Bibliophobia, I also wondered if my response to Balle constituted a readerly deficiency—a narcissistic demand to be charmed, to be considered, to be met halfway by the text. Or was it something else—an unwillingness to accept that admiration and attachment don’t always coincide?

Chihaya chronicles her relationship with literature through the lens of chronic depression and obsessive thought. In her chapter on falling in love with A.S. Byatt's Possession, she writes:

It was just so confident, so flauntingly itself (the most attractive thing in the world, in a person or in a book). This is still one of the things I love most about it – how it boldly, confidently performs both its intimidating intelligence and the gratification of its love of, or, better, lust for language. It is a book that is unafraid to exercise its ideas to their fullest, longest-winded extent, a quality that, I soon realized, did not endear it to everyone I recommend it to.

This description resonates with books that have moved me this past year: Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, with its architectural precision and emotional brutality; Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond, where interiority becomes its own landscape; Henry Hoke's Open Throat, narrated with feral intensity by a mountain lion. Each creates a world complete unto itself, yet extends an invitation to enter.

Balle’s novel does not.

A blurb on Balle's back cover promises: "you have never read anything like On The Calculation of Volume: unforgettable." The first claim may be true. The second depends entirely on the reader. I can acknowledge its singularity, but I will not remember it in the way I remember the books that have left a mark.

Bibliophobia concludes with an exchange from Sigrid Nunez's Paris Review interview:

Interviewer: Isn't a writer meant to have a sliver of ice in their heart?
Nunez: Yes, but not for the reader.

This distinction clarifies what I found missing in Balle—not warmth exactly, but acknowledgment. The difference between clinical observation and witness.

It is possible for a book to be brilliant and lifeless, to be masterful and inert. Some readers might see that as a feature rather than a flaw. I was chatting with

Sara Hildreth

about the book (she hasn’t read it yet) and she shared that a few people had told her that it just doesn't really make sense as a stand alone. That we should reserve our praise for when it's all out. Fair point which I am willing to consider and why, as I mentioned, I ordered the second book in the series. But for me, the books that last are the ones that reach beyond their own architecture and offer something more than anxiety and confusion. And to be honest, I don’t know if anxiety and confusion will carry me through 6 more books, just so I can see if it was me all along.

Perhaps the calculation I cannot perform is the precise measure of detachment a reader should maintain from a text. How much distance should we accept before we stop feeling engaged at all? If the desire for reciprocity between writer and reader marks me as unsophisticated, I accept the judgment. Because the alternative—the icy perfection of a book that only observes, never extends a hand—feels like being trapped in November 18 forever, waiting for something that will not arrive.

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Some questions for you:

• Have you ever admired a book's technical brilliance while feeling emotionally unmoved by it? What was that experience like?

• Where do you draw the line between your responsibility as a reader and the writer's obligation to create a text that invites connection?