Falling in love with a book
It hadn't happened in a while, then it hit
Sometimes a book comes along, meets you, and you two fall in love. It hadn’t happened to me in a while, then Sunday night, blam, coup de foudre.
I went to Wyoming for a couple days last week for a family gathering. On my connecting flight from Salt Lake City, I finished the novel I was reading—Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes, really good—and realized I’d brought nothing else. I mean, I had several nonfiction books on my Kobo that I needed to press into for research, but that kind of stuff was for work.
The airport bookstore: nope. The drive to the house: no bookstores. There were a couple Westerns lying around the rental, but nothing spoke to me. Then I checked the Libby app on my phone, and noticed a new hold had come in from the library: On the Calculation of Volume: Book I, by Solvej Balle.
So, in a small bedroom outside Jackson Hole, I cracked a beer, downloaded the book to my e-reader, and gave it a try. After maybe fifteen pages, I was locked.
Let me fast-forward for a moment, though hopefully it’ll make sense: Returning to Los Angeles a few days later, on the ride home from the airport, my twenty-something Uber driver asked what makes a good writer?
I said it was a good question and gave it a think.
We got there because she asked what I do for money, and we started talking about books and writing. She said she mostly read poetry, but not much lately, she’d gone through a family tragedy—her mother died last year at 56—and her reading had fallen off. Also, she only recently moved to LA from Atlanta and found herself questioning almost everything in her life.
I said for me, a good writer, at least ones I admire, are writers who surprise me, who persuade me with their surprises that their story, their sentences, could go no other way. It becomes a sort of pact, a sense the author has a firm grip on things, even if the story’s elusive or shaggy-dog—a promise that insights are to come, that a mystery on a literal or metaphysical level is being unspooled, even if there’s no detective lurking around.
On the Calculation of Volume is about a woman in France who wakes up one day—November 18—to realize it’s the same day all over again (kinda). And the story begins in media res, when there’s already been a hundred-plus November 18ths in the past hundred-plus days of her life. She’s holed up in the guest bedroom of the house she shares with her husband, who has no idea she’s there—in his timeline, on November 18th, she’s on a business trip in Paris. And she was, way back when. But he exists in a stream of time that she lives outside of—she keeps waking up on November 18, but she’s able to move through continuous November 18s, one after the other.
It’s a Groundhog Day story, but without shenanigans. Instead, the book is a series of observations, written as a diary, about all sorts of things: time, love, language, isolation, the cosmos. It’s both recursive and remixed. I really couldn’t get enough of it. And it’s apparently the first of a seven-volume opus, and the second book was released in English in 2024, with a third volume coming out this fall.
I told the Uber driver about it and she said it sounded cool. Approaching my house, we talked about other things—Los Angeles, spirituality, recent protests, the White House—then went back to talking about books, poetry, what reading does. “I just want a way to get to know people, you know, know them better,” she said. “People have a really hard time listening to each other, just being around each other. I think books do a way better job.”
Yeah, well, what she said.
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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.
Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
For books, articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.
Vols. I and II ordered now... It will be nice (and a mild relief) to inhabit someone else's thoughts for a while.