On the Calculation of Volume IV

A brilliant meditation on the collective, on the delights and tedium of living with others. ― Financial Times

The greatest literary work of the 21st century so far . . . these books will be seen by future scholars as the work which best captured the soul of our times, just as TS Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land, or Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, captured the soul of the early 20th century. ― The Herald

Near-addictive . . . [Balle] flits with ease between the high and the low . . . There is a magnetic monotony to her prose . . . [it] is relatable and readable even with its heady, conceptual core. ― Prospect

Astonishing . . . It took me two years to read À la recherche du temps perdu, and I've forgotten many parts of it already but I remember what it was like to read the last volume. It was . . . like no other reading experience, an elemental whoosh where all the patched-together reading over months suddenly made sense . . . Balle's work has something of that quality too. ― London Review of Books

One of the joys of the series is how Balle ever more ingeniously complicates the premise. The drama of the narrator's initial confusion has given way to recognition that her crisis is shared by growing numbers of people gathering together around Europe. Holed up in a villa outside Bremen, her own cohort forms a rota for chores and holds meetings to discuss their plight. For the reader, the peculiarity of the predicament is a gateway to considering everyday mysteries of consciousness, as Balle's so-called 'loopers' brainstorm ways to order their disrupted experience of time.' ― Daily Mail

Our century's answer to Proust. ― New York Times