There Is No Year: A Novel

✍ Scribed by Butler, Blake

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 6 MB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780062087324

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

Butler's inventive third book is dedicated ''For no one'' and begins with an eerie prologue about the saturation of the world with a damaging light. Suitably forewarned, the reader is introduced to an unexceptional no-name family. All should be idyllic in their newly purchased home, but they are shadowed by an unwelcome ''copy family.'' In the face of the copy mother, the mother sees her heretofore unrealized deterioration. Things only get worse as the father forgets how to get home from work; the mother starts hiding in the closet, plagued by an omnipresent egg; while the son gets a female ''special friend'' and receives a mysterious package containing photos of dead celebrities. The territory of domestic disillusion and postmodern dystopia is familiar from other tales, but Butler's an endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer. This subversion extends to the book's design: very short titled chapters with an abundance of white space. Not so much a novel as a literary tapestry, the book's eight parts are separated by blank gray pages. To Butler (Scorch Atlas), everything in the world, even the physical world, is gray and ever-changing, and potentially menacing. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

The mother, the father, and the son move into a new house, and the strange occurrences begin. First, they must remove a copy family'identical to the father, the mother, and the son in every way save for their moldy teeth'from the house. Then they begin exploring the house's many rooms'including one full of human hair. They gorge themselves on an impossibly large meal, and the mother finds a strange egg that causes all manner of bizarre things to occur, depending on where she touches it. Written in short, vignettelike chapters, this novel is intensely surreal and abstract. At times grotesque, at times sexual, always pushing the bounds of plot, form, narrative, and reality, the novel presents a demanding yet unique read. While the general state of anomie presented leaves the reader always guessing at the meaning of any given scene, the overall effect creates an interesting and convoluted tale of a family in distress. --Julie Hunt