“We have grown accustomed to living with knowledge of [our own improbability] without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we take the strangeness of it all for granted.” Solvej Balle, ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME

“My time is a container. . . . Every day I lower my body into the eighteenth of November. I move around but nothing runs over the edge. Time is a space. Time is a room.” ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME

A very calm and non-apocalyptic narrative; useful counterpoint to our daily reality.

Pompous

Agree: one of his very best. Marital war without quarter.

Finished it late last night. And it truly is. The title becoming more and more resonant as it works toward the concluding “Afterlife.”

“You can pray for grace, but it is a thing that creeps in unexpectedly, like a draft. . . . For one year, I carried this knowledge, and carried a simple space for God inside me. I subsisted in this watchful waiting, a readiness. But what came wasn’t God at all.” Mantel, GIVING UP THE GHOST