“There’s the gush of water through the pipes when he fills a kettle,” observes Tara Selter on the 18th of November. “The sound of metal on metal when he sets the kettle on the stove and the very faint click when he turns on the gas.” So begins Volume I of Solvej Balle’s multivolume novel On the Calculation of Volume. It is only later that we learn the full context of this scene: that Tara has been living in the 18th of November for over 120 days; that for a period she lived day after day with her husband, Thomas; and that she has recently moved into the guest room, silently following her husband through his sounds. Thomas’s noises throughout the house compose the ambient, sonic overture to the entire series. Put another way, Balle uses these sounds to initiate the reader to the novel by way of atmosphere. “I flow in and out of the house,” Tara tells us. “I flow through the day. I am fluid.” In this invisible state, Tara embodies the atmosphere herself, dissolving into her home like a ghost.
Atmosphere surrounds Tara, as she shares with the reader her extraordinary, endless November 18. Even when recollecting the story of her last real day—November 17—it is the atmosphere that she turns to: “I no longer remember the details of the evening’s conversation, but I remember the atmosphere in the room. I remember at one point sitting there studying a corner of the big old oak desk we were sitting around, which functioned as the shop counter.” She proceeds to describe the physical texture of the room in Paris, recalling the “marks in the woods” and “the warmth of the room.” On the Calculation of Volume is speckled with these frames of Tara’s world, composed with the spatial precision of a still life. As the series reaches its midway point, with the fourth volume being published in English this month, Tara travels throughout Europe in an infinite autumn, searching for a way out—or a way to make sense—of her peculiar predicament.
As a narrator, Tara is characterized by her canny observation. “I am sitting at the table in the guest room,” she reflects early in the first volume, “and the rain clouds are gathering once more. I gaze out at the garden and the apple tree. A couple of apples have fallen onto the grass, a light breeze has blown the autumn leaves almost dry while I’ve been sitting here, but the tree will soon be wet with rain again.” Channeling a phantomlike presence in her home, Tara pays careful attention to the ambient details of her day, noting the pattern of the weather, the quality of light, and the subtle sounds, moods, and shifts that together compose the atmosphere of her new life.
“What the best novels can do is open up spaces,” writes Karl Ove Knausgaard. “Balle has opened a space in time, and it is absolutely, absolutely incredible.” Knausgaard identifies Balle’s keen skill for expansion, her ability to unfold a life of experiences in the confines of a single day.
Yet time is not the only realm that On the Calculation of Volume seeks to open. While the literary phenomenon has been praised for its reflections on time, climate change, and relationships, what Balle’s novels explore most inventively is space: utilizing Tara’s time loop to unravel the texture, material, and reality of her atmosphere with thrilling freedom. “The loop-time creates more of a space, or a room,” explains Balle in a recent interview with The Drift, “than the usual view of time as a line or a river, or even a circle.”
Balle integrates Tara’s exploration of ambience, vibes, and space into her journey through November 18. In so doing, she reveals that what truly distinguishes On the Calculation of Volume is its intoxicating approach to contemporary “atmospheric” literature: specifically, how it vitalizes ambience as a formal device in the novel. And that’s because, despite what Knausgaard says about the novel’s fixation on time, On the Calculation of Volume is very much about volume: about the sounds, objects, and textures that fill the space of its pages, and how that world of atmospheric experience might take on new life.
On the Calculation of Volume follows Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller living in France. Finding herself trapped in a time loop on November 18, Tara experiences the fluid passage of time and remembers the events of each passing November 18. Yet all around her, the world appears stuck in a cycle of repetition: the falling of a piece of toast; her hotel’s breakfast; the pattern of weather and stars; the daily habits of her husband, Thomas, in their home in Clairon-sous-Bois. The rules of this newfound existence—unlike in other canonical time-loop plots—are ambiguous: a leek eaten by Tara vanishes from the garden the following morning, yet one eaten by her husband returns the next morning.
Volume III of the series notably breaks from Tara Selter’s isolation in the 18th of November, introducing new characters who are likewise trapped in an endlessly repeating day. First, Tara meets the sociologist Henry in Dusseldorf, and later the young Olga and her friend Ralf. These new characters, Tara finds, have a different relationship with November 18th: particularly Olga and Ralf, who believe that their stasis in time is an opportunity to fundamentally change the world.
Put another way, Olga and Ralf conceive of the 18th of November as a plot, something that has a definitive narrative arc, “a mission.” Their relationship to the endlessly repeating day is thus action-oriented, as the pair plot to enact change throughout the course of the day, from stopping a car crash to rushing sick people to the hospital. Seemingly everyone has conceived of their strange predicament in terms of forward momentum, as Tara notes how Henry envisions the 18th of November “like a train, and we are all seated in the same compartment. As if we are on a journey.”
Conversely, Tara reacts to her endlessly repeating day by minimizing her impact on the world. Conscious that the things she consumes do not reappear at the dawn of another 18th of November, she buys groceries set to expire at the end of the day, stays in homes that have been deserted, and keeps quietly to herself. Olga is surprised that Tara appears to drift passively through her time in the 18th of November: “She wondered why I focused only on doing as little harm as possible, on leaving only the faintest traces, that sort of thing. Rather than changing the world. Really changing it.”
Perhaps their differing approaches emerge from their differing understandings of the time loop itself. Rather than a plot, train ride, or journey, Tara imagines their stasis as “a container of time.” The phrase invokes Tara’s vision in Volume II of “a world full of containers,” reflecting a worldview in which things are not defined by change or momentum, but by space: “a house has become a container with light falling into the center and water flowing down into a pool when it rains.”
Rather than conceiving of her day as a time-bound plot, then, Tara conceives of November 18 as an atmosphere: an ineffable and invisible field that suffuses her experience. Something that does not move forward or backward but expands and contracts.
Atmosphere is not a new interest in contemporary literature. In fact, literature has been among the premier fronts of a cultural fixation on the atmospheric: the ephemeral, the hazy, the vibey. Look no farther than the frequent description on social media of novels, films, or TV shows as “no plot, just vibes.” Almost always works of first-person narration, these are usually works guided by a strong sense of character and free-flowing conversations or reflections, rather than traditional plot-based narratives.
Chief among the canon of “no plot, just vibes” novels include Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Rachel Cusk’s Outline. Both writers emphasize narrative voice and follow unnamed narrators’ experiences: for Moshfegh, a Columbia graduate sinking into a drug-induced hibernation, and for Cusk, a novelist teaching a course in Athens. These are novels in which fairly little happens by way of action; in the place of a traditional plot, the book is guided by the outlook, reflection, and experience rendered by the writer. For instance, in Outline, an entire chapter dedicated to describing the Athenian apartment the narrator is staying in: “I wandered around the apartment, looking at things.” In other words, these are novelists whose strength lies in their command of mood, tone, and atmosphere.
Stylistically, On the Calculation of Volume fits neatly into this larger contemporary trend of atmospheric literature. Guided by an intelligent, reflective narrator in Tara Selter, the novel is not motivated by plot events but by the flow of Tara’s thoughts on each November 18. Balle writes in bursts, with simple, patient sentences that slowly elaborate her scenes. She uses periods and section breaks frequently, as if pausing for breath periodically throughout the novel. Balle’s contemplative, placid rhythm resembles the sparseness of Cusk or Moshfegh, creating a prose style that pays close attention to sounds, textures, and objects.
Atmosphere is not a new interest in contemporary literature. In fact, literature has been among the premier fronts of a cultural fixation on the atmospherics: the ephemeral, the hazy, the vibey.
Writing from the perspective of “the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere,” Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno search for literary tone and similarly ineffable qualities in their book Tone. They propose that literary tone is, in some aspects, about an accumulation of narrative matter, writing, “It seems to us that a hoard, with its power to create an atmosphere, to infiltrate and surround, at once possessing and possessed, must have a relation to tone.” Balle’s stylistic approach perhaps could not be better summarized than “at once possessing and possessed,” achieving a fuguelike lucidity that thickens the longer Tara lingers in November 18.
Additionally, Tara is in the unique position of being able to observe her surroundings again, again, and again. As the day recurs endlessly, she gains a deeper, richer observation of the atmosphere she inhabits. Things stick to her if she holds on to them, accumulate through the series: a Roman sestertius, a wool dress, a notebook. Our passage through the 18th of November is marked by the texture of objects and their gradual consumption by Tara—as she quickly learns, the things she consumes do not regenerate in the morning. “There they stand, these things. Full of meaning,” reflects Tara in Volume II. “And there we stand, illuminated by their meaning.” In this sense, On the Calculation of Volume is predisposed to atmospheric detail by way of Tara’s role as our narrator. As Thomas, Tara’s husband, tells her later in Volume I, she would find her way through the day “with your gifts, he said. Your eye for detail.”
On the Calculation of Volume is thus atmospheric in the same way that much of recent fiction is atmospheric: the physical, sensory detail with which Tara experiences the world accumulates and renders the novel livable. Balle’s ability to invoke an ambience is one of the great strengths of the series. We live with Tara from her home in Clarion-sous-Bois, to her apartment in Dusseldorf, to Café Möller, where she meets Henry in Volume III. Balle describes the experience of these places in rich sensory detail which, like with the prose of Cusk or Moshfegh, allows a reader to dwell in these spaces themselves.
The strength of these novels, undergirded by their narration, is in this experiential directness. After a week spent reading On the Calculation of Volume, it became increasingly easy to imagine oneself the November rain in Clarion-sous-Bois, the cool metal of the sestertius, the gushing sound of water in pipes.
However, what separates Balle is her understanding that atmosphere is more than the accumulation of ambient details. Atmospheres are “quasi-objective,” as the philosopher Gernot Böhme articulates in The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: “Namely … they are out there; you can enter an atmosphere and you can be surprisingly caught by an atmosphere. But on the other hand atmospheres are not beings like things; they are nothing without a subject feeling them.”
This quasi objectivity is put to the test by Balle in Volume II, when Tara meets a meteorologist in Copenhagen. Seasons, the meteorologist explains, are not simply “meteorological phenomena” like “cold and heat, cloudbursts and drought.” Rather, the meteorologist “saw them more as psychological phenomena. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experiences and feelings, perhaps.” A season combines objective reality and subjective experience in a tenuous balance that defines atmosphere.
It is this system of subtle and precarious vibes that Tara chases throughout Volume II. Tara’s pursuit of the seasons sees her follow the patterns of the climate yet also sees her retreat deeper into herself and her memories. Tara’s summer is entangled with memory, of Thomas’s “footsteps on the stairs on a summer afternoon. The wood creaking at every step he takes.” There is something difficult to precisely locate in the feeling of springtime, yet Tara finds it in Cornwall, “Something in the air or somewhere inside me.”
On the Calculation of Volume is inventive in its ability to navigate between the subjective and objective realms of atmosphere. Authors like Moshfegh and Cusk prioritize subjective experience and thus get trapped in the haze of the feeling subject, whereby the texture and detail of the world is always subsumed by the subjective perspective of its narrator. The result, more often than not, is an overall fogginess.
There is a heady, glazed quality to a novel like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, as if the entire frame is filtered by a colored lens (it is no mistake that canonical “no plot, just vibes” films, such as Lost in Translation or the films of Wong Kar-Wai, are frequently visually distinguished by filters and haze). The narrator of Moshfegh’s novel describes her hibernation as an echoing chamber of total subjectivity: “If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared.” In this sense, atmospheric literature strains toward the affective, embracing the fog of emotion, feeling, and personal experience. This is the great strength of a novel like My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Outline; but in creating prose that feels immediate and direct, the world of these works are often also ensnared by that affective experience. As Mosfegh’s narrator realizes upon waking up, “I was always still me.”
Yet that is not the case in On the Calculation of Volume. Instead, Balle pierces the stream of Tara’s thoughts with the material reality through which she moves. Balle’s prose constantly shifts between the granular detail of the objective world out there with Tara’s thoughts in here, approximating the subject-object in-betweenness of atmosphere. There is a confounding lack of certainty in the reality of the series, no clear basis for why objects disappear or why they remain. Therefore, Tara’s experience of the world is always precariously felt, as she expresses when she moves to Bremen in Volume III with Henry, Olga, and Ralf: “We are getting used to the house, either that or the house is getting used to us.”
In Tone, Samatar and Zambreno compare literary tone to a lighted window, writing, “To be at the window is to invite a tone of fantasy: we are inside, imagining the shapes in the street, or outside, dreaming of the lamplit interior.” Balle’s time-loop premise manages to dodge this dichotomy entirely, as Tara is able to be both inside and outside at once: in November 18, Tara has the ability to be in both the lamplit room and the street. While the novel is still filtered through Tara’s narration, On the Calculation of Volume might be compared to three-dimensional glasses, giving its reader a kind of literary depth perception.
This narrative potential of atmosphere has long interested novelists. In “The Weather in Proust,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes how Proust’s narrator describes himself as an “animated little barometer,” noting the peculiarity of selecting an instrument that measures air pressure, “a subtle, invisible, and indivisibly systemic index of weather.” Unlike a thermometer, which directly measures the quality of heat, the barometer “means nothing at all outside a dynamic interpretive context,” requiring a sensitivity to temperatures, weights, and interactions between columns of air that construct the vast systems of the world’s weather. As a narrator, Tara also functions much like a barometer, maintaining a constant sensitivity to the changing systems of November 18.
It is not that, as so many atmospheric novels have been ascribed, “nothing happens.” Rather, the source of dramatic tension and emotion is an interaction occurring on the register of the atmosphere: invisible yet acutely felt.
In Volume III, Tara returns to her home in Clarion-sous-Bois for the first time, after nearly 1,000 days of chasing seasons, studying ancient Rome, and meeting Henry in Dusseldorf. When she returns to her home—an atmosphere exactly the same as the one that began the series—she finds the ambience newly oppressive. “It is the eighteenth of November. I have grown used to the thought,” she writes, repeating language from Volume I. “But I cannot get used to the sounds. They are the sounds of what I have lost. I cannot get used to the loss of Thomas, of his body moving around and making sounds.”
The moment is crushing: the same sounds that were endlessly familiar to Tara in Volume I—the gush of water through pipes, the click of the gas stove, the orchestra of intimacy, harmony, and love—are now transformed into a storm of panic and despair, the feeling of being “trapped in the room.” The stakes of the moment are built purely by the tension between the material properties of the 18th of November and Tara’s subjective experience of the world; it is not that, as so many atmospheric novels have been ascribed, “nothing happens.” Rather, the source of dramatic tension and emotion is an interaction occurring on the register of the atmosphere: invisible yet acutely felt.
To borrow the words of Proust’s narrator, the moment is purely barometric. The ingenuity of Balle’s series, and her great skill as a writer, is her ability to demonstrate how atmosphere readily accommodates such depth of feeling.
On the Calculation of Volume expands what “atmospheric” literature can, and should, mean. Balle embraces the affective immediacy of her prose and style, and, like the works of other writers of great atmospheric literature, Tara’s resonates as a singular narrative voice. Yet unlike other writers, Balle adds another element: she mobilizes the ambience of November 18 as a central, dynamic, and complex formal aspect of her series, the world of objects unfolding as a place of narrative experimentation and insight. Rather than the plot being obfuscated by the atmosphere of her novel, the vibes are precisely where Balle locates her most intoxicating and propulsive writing.
What is most compelling about atmosphere is its innate ubiquity. Everyone has felt the force of an atmosphere, from the convivial warmth of a crowded restaurant to the chilly emptiness of a deserted train platform. In On the Calculation of Volume, Balle distills these fleeting experiences into an engrossing literary epic, creating space in November 18 to give the atmosphere of every day its due. A great atmospheric novel does not only produce atmosphere—like some kind of literary fog machine—but also shows readers how atmosphere functions in our own lives. The secret to our continued fascination with Tara’s endless autumn, and the continued success of Balle’s series, lies in part in Balle’s attunement to this fact: that in unravelling the ambient world of noisy pipes and Roman coins, we are brought slightly closer to the objects, sounds, and people who compose our own little atmospheres. 
This article was commissioned by Nicholas Dames.
Featured image: Autumn Rain by Edvard Munch, 1892.
