Tara Selter, an antiquarian book dealer, wakes up and it is the eighteenth of November. It is the eighteenth of November again the next day, and the next, and it doesn’t stop. She isn’t looking for a way out and there’s no comic montage — she just keeps a record. Her husband greets her fresh every morning and she has to decide, daily, whether to explain. She moves into the spare room so he won’t find her. Food she eats doesn’t come back to the shelves, so the world is quietly being depleted by her presence. Balle, a Danish writer, planned seven volumes and spent decades on them, and the flat precision of the prose is what makes it hypnotic instead of gimmicky.
On the Calculation of Volume, Book I