Every month can’t be the month where I read one of the greatest novels ever written in English!! Let’s dive in to what I did (and did not!) read in April.
Went to Maine to feel alive.
What I read in April:
Solvej Balle, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell, On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV) (2022/2026)—I am simply loving this series!
Weirdly (or maybe it’s not that weird), now that I’m halfway through the series, I’m somewhat at a loss as to what to say about Book IV. Plot-wise, we’re motoring, and I don’t want to say too much else about that because there’s a part of me that feels like even though the “point” of the series isn’t “the plot,” the plot is still kind of important (???) and I wouldn’t want to “spoil” it for any curious Book Report readers thinking about joining me on the Balle bandwagon! Needless to say, I read Book IV in a day, starting it before work, letting what I’d read so far sustain me through the day, and then finishing it after work and staying up past my bedtime to do so.
Ginger Spice gives ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ to Book IV.
Idk if it’s the big change I made in my life this month1 (it is), ““““current”””” ““““events”””” (it is this, a little bit), or my looming milestone birthday (it’s maybe, like, 3% this) but I found so much to reflect on in Book IV. For one thing, in this volume, 6 years’ of daily November 18ths have elapsed, and where Book I at times evokes the early months of COVID lockdown, Book IV carries an undertow of processing a world-changing experience (“Were we trying to describe an event or a state?” [81] and “even if we can’t find words that fit, we can talk about how it was. When time fell apart. Those earliest days” [94]) while figuring out how to live in that changed world.
At the same time, while narrator Tara Selter’s recollections of what those early months of the time loop felt like probably capture some people’s memories of early pandemic, they also describe grief about loss, generally: “You remember how it was. The future that vanished. How everything you envisioned came to nothing. The loneliness, the disquiet, the doubt. . . . Everything you went through. And then you understand that you managed to keep your head above water only through immense effort. That your feet couldn’t touch the bottom: You simply had to keep swimming, no land in sight” (91). Six years after she became stuck in time, Tara considers whether she can be happy, knowing that her husband is in another country, going about his days alone and without her:
Of course I can. . . . That’s what people have always done. There has always been someone to miss. Think of that. Think of all the people who miss someone, and who go on living anyway. Day after day. It’s manageable. Think of that. Of course you can be happy in the meantime. I unwrap and pickle and set out plates in the kitchen. Everything is easier when I rinse vegetables in a sink. When I chop and slice and think of the past. It’s what people have always done when they missed someone. History helps. A little. I don’t know how you get used to these days, but somehow, you do.” (132).
And if I had to say what my favorite part about Book IV is, I’d say it’s this volume’s extended meditation on the everyday.2 Tara has stopped actively searching for a cause of or way out from her endless November 18. She’s not going about in pity for herself. She’s accepted her situation, found a way to dwell within the day and to make meaning out of daily tasks and activities of living—growing/sourcing, cooking, and eating food; decorating and furnishing a home; sewing; and writing. More than any of the other books so far in this series, Book IV is in communion with Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (1963/2022), down to a woman chopping firewood, finding a sustainable rhythm in quotidian acts of survival, and writing her thoughts out for a reader she may never have, as she cannot be certain anyone might exist who would read what she’s written.
This is a novel about acceptance! And what comes with that!!
It’s also still totally about fundamental questions of language, identity, and community but I’ll spare you the details. Just know that I am still deeply enjoying turning over several passages from Balle’s sneaky history of philosophy 👹
What I didn’t finish reading in April:
Bothayna Al-Essa, tr. Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, The Book Censor’s Library (2019/2024)3—Middlemarch was going to be a tough act to follow no matter what I read, so for a couple of weeks I gave myself the breathing room of watching literally any baseball game I could find because apparently that is my life now, tuning into teams I don’t care about like I’m a degenerate gambler except the thing I’m addicted to is sport narrative??4
Anyway, I don’t want to be mean about The Book Censor’s Library, but reading 60 pages was plenty to determine that this novel is Not For Me, an adult. The concept was intriguing—an apparatchik of an authoritarian government reviews novels to assess their suitability for the reading public; as he reads, he is transformed into a thinking and questioning being. Presumably, trouble ensues for him the more he engages with what he reads and thus the more he pursues “subversive” material to read. Also presumably, this novel ends like any of the other dystopian fictions that The Book Censor’s Library heavily references—1984 (1949), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), The Metamorphosis (1915), and these are only a few that the reader is hammered with in the first 60 pages.
But I stopped reading because:
this novel, ironically, either abhors subtext or doesn’t trust its audience enough to pick up on subtext; and
simply adding pictures does not make a novel “experimental” or “postmodern”—pictures in this novel function as they do in young adult literature, to echo/reinforce what has already been spelled out in the narrative; and
the ratio of literary references to original text is so extreme that this book reads more like fan fiction than anything else. It feels very “copy/paste/change some words” from other texts;
the core of this novel is the message that being a Reader is an Identity, and reading is heroic, it makes the Reader into a Hero. That kind of message is simply too childish for me to spend time on; and, finally
all of the above reasons, plus a fundamental disjunct between voice and character (the protagonist, at the start, is a sort of unthinking man, but the voice given to his inner thoughts is that of the smug narrator’s, which expresses judgments about reading and books that would be unimaginable to the type of guy the protagonist is)
Back when I was teaching writing and literature to undergrads while writing my dissertation, I used to only be able to grade papers in small bursts because if I read the students’ writing for too long, I’d begin subconsciously to absorb it and regurgitate it into my own pages. Reading the first 60 pages of The Book Censor’s Library recalled that time in my life where it felt critical to block out well-meaning but ham-fisted arguments about literacy and “today’s society,” lest I inadvertently make them my own.
What I’m looking forward to reading in May:
Cristina Campo, tr., Alex Andriesse, The Unforgivable and Other Writings (1962, 1971/2024)5
Andrew Dana Hudson, Absence (2026)
Marlen Haushofer, tr., Shaun Whiteside, The Fifth Year (1952/2026)
Jorie Graham, Killing Spree (2026)
1 Yes, I’m in my Lydgate Era (callback to Middlemarch). No, I don’t want to talk about it.
2 BIG SURPRISE, I love another literary depiction of the everyday.
3 Book Club selection for April.
4 I did (do?) care about the Mets, but ooo they’re making it hard.
5 Book Club selection for May.
In retrospect, this was an omen.
