‘There Is No Year’ was painful in the same way Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void or Sean Baker’s Take Out were painful. I think the stretches of monotony were a storytelling device, a way of fleshing out the environment by show as opposed to tell.

Even though email and social networking and cell phones were frequently mentioned in the story, I kept feeling like they were in the 1950s.

I felt like I know these people, but like I didn’t know them at all, but I know plenty of people like that… who you don’t really ever know because they don’t share anything about themselves, they never discuss things openly, they hoard their secrets like a barrier between themselves and the world.

The book was somewhat difficult to start reading or pick back up, but once under way it was so engrossing that I lost time in it. I nearly missed a subway stop because I was so in the vast world Butler has created. Because it was so absorbing, it didn’t feel like a ton of work to read at the time, but the curious thing about this book is that having finished it other books are easier. It’s like I’ve been bench pressing literary chains with my mind and am now breezing through hauling my usually difficult 50 pound suitcase up the stairs.

‘There Is No Year’ doesn’t make sense.

Mr. Butler, before a reading he gave at McNally Jackson on Monday, seemed to indicate it may not even make sense to him.

The lack of sense is what makes this book such a wonderful world to explore.

Blake, by the way, has a soft hypnotic drawl when he reads, and the cadence of a rapper. If you have the chance to hear him, I’d recommend you take it.

-Stoya