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A review by chrissych
There Is No Year by Blake Butler
3.0
This is a very hard book to think critically about, so I've chosen 3 stars: I both loved and hated it, wanted to both keep reading it into the night and forget that I had ever laid eyes on it. "An experience," are two very fitting words I can use to describe it. Pretension and honesty wrapped up in a curious package that seems to so well accomplish what it means to, though you wonder if what it means to accomplish is at all meaningful. And whether that matters, in the context of this approach to literature.
Other fitting words I could use to describe the experience are these:
Reading this book is like having a friend tell you about a really creepy, vivid, fucked up fever dream that sways drunkenly from one scene of horror to the next, illogically, the dreamer now awake and logical and detached from the dream so that the words relay a shifting and immutable terror in a voice devoid of the terror that it should hold. These scenes are planted like seeds in your mind in their own vivid imagery, if you're like me and you see and smell and taste and touch everything you're told (or everything you read) in great sensory detail. And there they remain trapped forever and left to grow, though you probably don't want them there, to be recalled at random in a passing conversation, a glance, a scene in your periphery, or worse, inside your own dreams. Only unlike the dreamer relaying the dream, you are awake and these ideas come to live in your waking memory and you can't quite stunt your emotional response to them the way the dreamer could. You're stuck with these thoughts, these nightmares from other minds, inside your own head, forever. They haunt you. You love everything about them. You hate everything about them.
Reading this book is pretty much exactly that experience, except now the dreamer is an author accomplished at evoking the most feverish of fever dreams.
Each short chapter is like a small and fantastically written ultra-modern poem that doesn't necessarily transition or connect to the chapter-poems around it. Butler makes use of unique text arrangement (quite in the style of [b:House of Leaves|24800|House of Leaves|Mark Z. Danielewski|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51CV88E7WQL._SL75_.jpg|856555], a novel that I have to think was an IMMENSE influence on him), blurry black and white photographs, and changes in the pages' colour, from black to white and everything in between, to draw the reader in and jar them. These tiny fragments, the chapter-poems and images and formatting and colours, can be bunched together into a few central ideas: nihilism, the psychological landscape of the home, time and memory and the failures of both, illness, the banality of modern life (re: existential bullshit), horror, the frantic feeling of being trapped inside a family or a relationship or a house or a dream or a body, and so on and so on...
But mostly what you're left with at the end is someone else's nightmare in your mind.
It is simultaneously the worst and the best thing.
Other fitting words I could use to describe the experience are these:
Reading this book is like having a friend tell you about a really creepy, vivid, fucked up fever dream that sways drunkenly from one scene of horror to the next, illogically, the dreamer now awake and logical and detached from the dream so that the words relay a shifting and immutable terror in a voice devoid of the terror that it should hold. These scenes are planted like seeds in your mind in their own vivid imagery, if you're like me and you see and smell and taste and touch everything you're told (or everything you read) in great sensory detail. And there they remain trapped forever and left to grow, though you probably don't want them there, to be recalled at random in a passing conversation, a glance, a scene in your periphery, or worse, inside your own dreams. Only unlike the dreamer relaying the dream, you are awake and these ideas come to live in your waking memory and you can't quite stunt your emotional response to them the way the dreamer could. You're stuck with these thoughts, these nightmares from other minds, inside your own head, forever. They haunt you. You love everything about them. You hate everything about them.
Reading this book is pretty much exactly that experience, except now the dreamer is an author accomplished at evoking the most feverish of fever dreams.
Each short chapter is like a small and fantastically written ultra-modern poem that doesn't necessarily transition or connect to the chapter-poems around it. Butler makes use of unique text arrangement (quite in the style of [b:House of Leaves|24800|House of Leaves|Mark Z. Danielewski|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51CV88E7WQL._SL75_.jpg|856555], a novel that I have to think was an IMMENSE influence on him), blurry black and white photographs, and changes in the pages' colour, from black to white and everything in between, to draw the reader in and jar them. These tiny fragments, the chapter-poems and images and formatting and colours, can be bunched together into a few central ideas: nihilism, the psychological landscape of the home, time and memory and the failures of both, illness, the banality of modern life (re: existential bullshit), horror, the frantic feeling of being trapped inside a family or a relationship or a house or a dream or a body, and so on and so on...
But mostly what you're left with at the end is someone else's nightmare in your mind.
It is simultaneously the worst and the best thing.