Lars Iyer, Spurious, Melville House, 2011
"In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Squad comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences and better gin. One reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no one seems to know what to do about.
Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled to solve some major philosophical questions (such as "Why?") and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus... before it is too late. Or, he has to move."
"Forget crime-lit., or chick-lit., this is wit-lit. For Spurious is one of those rare little (quasi-) novels that is truly witty, not just funny or amusing. There is virtually no plot - simply a meandering account of two academic philosophers in search of truth, meaning and friendship, by way of gin and man-bags. But there is dialogue a-plenty, and shed-loads of wistful reflection, all of it expressed in the same kind of sparse but quirky humour that marked out Joseph Heller's Catch 22. In Spurious, the central character - Lars - is constantly and mercilessly lampooned by the imperious 'W', who claims that he, Lars, by his very existence has 'subtracted something from the world.' Indeed, Lars is so useless that a reflection in the waters around Plymouth is akin to 'the kraken of (his) idiocy', and he is so endearingly pathetic that 'W' likens him to a whining, 'sad ape locked up with its faeces'. Like two stage characters in a Beckett play, waiting for an end that may or may not come, they face life with stoicism and forlorn hope, whilst avoiding mould spores and dull conference speakers. Buy it, read it, and love it, for in these miserable times the laughter and the insights will sustain you for quite a while." - Paul Grosch
"Laurel and Hardy, Bert and Ernie, Withnail and Marwood... double acts have long delighted us. Couples, it seems, are intrinsically funny. Lars and W., the heroes of Lars Iyer's novel Spurious – and, in their own way, fighting damp, fighting their stupidity, squabbling with each other, they are heroic – easily join the ranks of the best of them. Two intellectuals – and not ‘would-be intellectuals’ either, our heroes are clever and well-read, but know, because of this, how little they know, how huge is their ignorance – who battle and bond, who gossip, grumble and gripe. W. castigates, Lars reports back. Their squabbles are incessant and repetitive, but there is no enmity here: “W. tests me on Spinoza: What is a mode? What’s a substance? What’s an atttibute? ... W. tells me ... ‘get The Idiot’s Guide to Spinoza, then. But that’ll be too hard, too. Start with these letters on a piece of paper: S-P-I-N-O-Z-A. Ponder that in your stupidity’.” Clever about how being clever is never that far from being daft as a brush, rarely ennobling, and mostly just beside the point, this is one of funniest books about friendship I’ve ever read." - Mark Thwaite
"The jacket copy on its back cover calls Spurious "raucous" and "hilarious" and the front matter labels the book “a novel.” These are not the first words that come to mind. “Provocative” and “narrative” would be more accurate. The substance of Spurious is philosophical debate, though, so my quibbling seems appropriate. Spurious consists of the musings of the narrator Lars and his (only?) friend W. There is some plot insofar as they travel together, and there is a brief conflict surrounding W.'s proposal to move to Canada, but the book is mostly talk without action. These obsessive men are both amused and depressed by the world, searching for some solace for the misery of existence through discussion, writing, friendship, and alcohol, all of which are treated as pleasures but also as subjects of philosophical inquiry. W. is the alpha philosopher of this tiny pack, a supposedly brilliant man who has spent his whole life waiting for an idea. Thinking is hard work, and it can't coexist with reading, writing, talking, or drinking. The characters’ discussions range from the esoteric to the mundane. They are particularly obsessed with “end times” and believe they are living on the verge of the apocalypse—W. exploring various religions to cope with this idea. They are also obsessed with Kafka and live in the shadow of his genius. The headiness of this philosophical dialogue is offset by W.’s casual put-downs of Lars about his weight, his lack of savoir-faire, and especially his apartment, which is plagued by a mysterious dampness that cannot be eradicated or even explained by experts. The damp is ominous, but also comical: a domestic conundrum that portends a vague larger doom. Other light touches grace the offbeat friendship between these pompous men, like their childish penchant for drawing male genitalia and their fussiness as they travel in Europe. It’s ultimately a buoyant (if not raucous) narrative floating on a dark sea of philosophical gloom." - D. Quentin Miller
"Lars Iyers’ Spurious is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time. It manages to pull off a unique achievement: presenting the characters’ struggle with philosophy in a charming and funny way, without for all that making fun of the philosophical enterprise as a whole. In that way, the ficionalized Lars and his overbearing friend W. may be the modern inheritors of the early Socratic dialogues—not the ones that lay out Plato’s elaborate theories, but the ones where everyone ends up more confused than before. I was among the readers of the original blog posts that Iyer used as raw materials for this book, and I am impressed by the way he has transmuted what could sometimes be morose or melancholic materials into an extremely humorous whole. A big part of this comes from the forceful presence of W., who seems to be a force of nature that strangely parallels the damp that threatens to destroy Lars’s apartment. The novel’s approach reminded me of Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, but Iyer manages to transform Bernhard’s sometimes grim claustrophobia into comedy." - Adam Kosko
"Lars Iyer's Spurious is, hands down, one of my favourite books of the year. Its two protagonists are a couple of woodlice à la Bouvard and Pécuchet (or Vladimir and Estragon) whose very failure to live up to the Continental thinkers/writers they so admire, turns out, paradoxically, to be a successful way of living up to them (and even living out their works). Time and time again, they fail successfully. Hilarious, erudite and often moving, Spurious manages to combine high-minded Modernism with a very English instinct to mock intellectual pretension. The constant oscillation between the two -- this fundamental ambiguity -- enables Iyer to have his cake and eat it, which is the very definition of literature in my book." - Andrew Gallix
"It's no secret that I love this work of fiction - I even blurbed it on the back cover. It is frankly one of the most brilliant works of fiction I have read in a long time. You know, we're told that novels shouldn't be like this, we're told that novels should be something else. But Spurious eschews this notion - and becomes a novel like no other because of it. Dripping in scathing wit, irony and deep, deep despair it pulls the reader in. Holding us close. Both laugh-out-loud-funny and achingly sad it seems to exist somewhere strangely in between these two extremes. Lars Iyers balances these opposites with all the vim and skill of a funambulist. But what strikes me most about Spurious is that packed within this flimsy, little oddity of a novel is a whole philosophical discourse that seeks to examine the rupture between eastern and western thought, the incurable obsession with our own endtimes, and the cyclical nature of the death drive – and Lars Iyers STILL manages to make all this a hoot! Wonderful Stuff." - Lee Rourke
"Any book in which the two main characters often seem to converse by drawing willies is always likely to find a place in my heart. And this did not fail to, although perhaps I was not as fond of it as some.
The good points. The characters are well crafted, realistic and honestly drawn. Their foibles are the same as all of ours, regardless of their austere professions and indulgent rantings. I defy anyone not to be in stitches as W continually berates Lars, but also touched by their genuine friendship that seems to know no dishonesty, which is perhaps a rare thing. W's often acerbic wit, whilst it might be cutting, does not seem to be made with a genuine intention to upset or undermine Lars. His remarks are nearly always followed up with a slight against himself, although he is always, of course, marginally superior in every way.
The only story that this book could be said to have is in regard of the spread of the truly horrific damp in Lars' house. But this is not so much a plot, more a metaphor. It spreads malignantly throughout the book and, towards the end, on every page. I read it as a metaphor for the underlying state of Lars' life as it spreads, unhindered and undiagnosed, through his house as it does through his life. To me, and perhaps I am wrong, W's concern was expressed in the only way he could, through his acerbic wit. But it was still genuine and still very touching.
Yet this book, although marginally the best in the Not the Booker, to me had some major drawbacks. I found it a little difficult to read. It is short, not running to more than 200 pages I don't think. Yet it took me a week to read. I found that I struggled to read more than 20 pages at a time. Each sitting was at the most 20 minutes, before I’d start reading a non-fiction book which I was reading concurrently. I didn't find that it hooked me. Perhaps that is the lack of a plot to carry me through. However, I think that it is mostly because, I believe, this was initially a blog written by the author. And it shows. No 'chapter' is more than 8, maybe 10 pages long. It is very episodic and very repetitive so that you don't feel like you are getting anywhere. Occasionally, one chapter will seems to be told again in the very next chapter, using different words. In fact one might say that nothing happens: nobody comes and nobody goes. But perhaps that shows its fidelity to actual life, rather than to imagined life.
Whilst I personally think that this is a fair criticism, others might point out that this is not a story. This is a portrait of two people and, in particular, of their friendship. And as just that, as a portrait, it is very touching indeed." - Anthony Dickinson
"That the two protagonists of Spurious are constantly asking themselves what Kafka would do in any given situation is indicative of their melodramatic intellectualism, one that this book burlesques in a highly comedic fashion. A fragmented, diaristic account of a dysfunctional friendship between two writers, Spurious emerges from a blog of the same name and is the literary debut of Lars Iyer (a Blanchot scholar based at University of Newcastle). Here 'Lars' and his friend W. endlessly decry their failures as humans, intellectuals and writers, in an atmosphere of gloom so pervasive that it enters a world of hysterical pathos, creating an amusing and occasionally moving piece of writing.
The pair's passion for other writers, expressed in conversations and phonecalls, only heightens their sense of inadequacy. Comparing their correspondence to that of Levinas and Blanchot, and lamenting that only a few letters of that relationship survive, Lars notes that: 'Of ours, which take the form of obscenities and drawings of cocks exchanged on Microsoft Messenger, everything survives, though it shouldn't'. Ominously, Lars's home is damp and festering with ever-growing mould: at times he fears the building will deliquesce completely.
What's left for W. and him to cling to? Only their pathetic excuse for a friendship. As Lars says, 'I am his idiot, but he is mine, and it's this we have in our joy and laughter, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy'. As the title suggests, these characters might only be a sham, a satire on intellectuals gone to seed. Nevertheless, the depiction of writers ruined by their own work rings true." - Laura McLean-Ferris
"Lars Iyer’s debut novel, Spurious, is about two British intellectuals who travel around Europe, drinking and talking about such topics as literature, continental philosophy and how they have failed to achieve their dreams—but if this description sounds dreary, it’s only an illustration of the inability of a plot summary to convey the actual experience of reading a novel. Spurious is a hysterically funny comic novel comprised almost entirely of conversations between its two protagonists, W., a sharp-tongued scholar who constantly bemoans his inability to understand complicated maths, and Lars, a portly, middle-aged academic whose apartment is slowly succumbing to an untraceable damp and who wastes much of his time writing down all of the things that W. says and posting them to a blog (and, indeed, Spurious began its life in a blog of the same name written by Lars Iyer, who is, of course, a scholar and an expert on the work of French author and critic Maurice Blonchot).
For all of its intellectual references to Kafka, Blanchot, Kant and Schelling, the focus of the book is on the close-but-dysfunctional relationship of the two main characters (indeed the tone and form of Spurious isn’t entirely dissimilar to the film Withnail and I, and fans of that movie would almost certainly enjoy this novel). Most of their conversations begin with W. asking such questions of Lars as these: ‘When did you know you were a failure? When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own—not one?’ and the joy is in watching their semi-serious attempts to answer these absurdities. W. and Lars belong to a long tradition of great comedic duos, from Laurel and Hardy to Vladimir and Estragon from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but there’s also a good deal of fun at the expense of scholarly life in the grand tradition of academic satire, such as in this passage about the publication of W.’s most recent book:
‘W.’s book has come out, he says. His editor went down to dine with W. and brought him twenty copies of his own book... His book is better than him, W. and I both agree. It’s greater. What’s it about?, I ask him of a particularly difficult section. He’s got no idea, he says.’
This book is full of wonderful, little comic scenes, most of them initiated by W.’s barbs at his friend Lars; indeed, this is suggested in the title Spurious, which technically refers to a false correlation or inference, but in this instance could similarly describe the book’s many verbal spurs—W. attacks and insults Lars in a way that’s only possible within the confines of a close relationship. And for all of its highbrow references, the novel is also written in a surprisingly plain and simple language and it’s not afraid to go lowbrow for a laugh (i.e. for a book that’s got a lot of references to philosophy, there are also quite a few dick jokes).
Spurious is one of the funniest books I’ve read in years, and I can also say that I enjoyed reading Spurious more than any novel I’ve read this year—it’s just bad, unclean, mean-spirited fun in the best possible way. But Spurious also manages to find real warmth and humanity in the discourse of two marginal misanthropes without ever swerving into easy sentimentality. Buy one copy for yourself and extra copies for those friends you have who always end up talking about intellectual topics at parties—trust me, they need to read this book, if only to remember that the overexamined life is also not worth living." - Emmett Stinson
"Some of you will have noticed a curious phenomenon emerging across the country. I am talking about a new breed of philosophers; somewhat dishevelled-looking, ragged jumper but good shoes, a bike helmet under one arm, a not-too-demanding job (a bit of teaching, a bit of proof-reading), little money, a lot of ideas. And, crucially, a beard, not a full-blown one, just a designer stubble gotten out of hand. The image should be familiar to you, go to any literary do or political meeting and you will soon find yourself talking to one of them. They are alert, friendly, but not overly so, always keen to tell of their fresh thoughts urbi et orbi. Let’s come back to this movement later if, indeed, a movement it is.
If it is, and if there are rules for joining it, the author of Spurious qualifies, at least in the sense that he is a good talker, has plenty of ideas and, importantly, a beard (at the last count). His sidekick W. (whose real name Iyer inadvertently blurted out to a group of followers, but this is no place to disclose it) has his own facial hair ambitions: “W.’s impressed with my stubble, he says. Am I trying to grow a beard. We should both grow beards, we agree, and shake on it.”The book is a series of conversations between Lars and W., interspersed by the narrator’s accounts of damp attacking his house. They are seasoned discoursers, and to watch their verbal ping pong is equally amusing and educational.
W., Lars’ friend-cum-nemesis, seems to be the fiercer of the two. It is he who swoops on his interlocutor every now and again, urging him to admit a number of things, particularly that both of them are failures, and reminding him of their many spiritual leaders. The latter form an orderly queue; among them are Kafka, Béla Tarr, Franz Rosenzweig (who was, it transpires, Kafka’s teacher), as well as some unnamed visionaries. But it is Kafka the pair always turn to, worshipping him and blaming him for everything. Their story goes like this: … we opened The Castle. It was quite fatal - there was literature itself! We were finished.
After this brutal start, Literature [...] couldn’t help infecting our philosophy”sounds like the right diagnosis; however, when it comes to physical illnesses, the picture is more blurred. W. has been ill for most of his life, but never got a single thought out of his condition. He is, of course, disappointed - after all, it worked remarkably well for Kafka and Blanchot.
The friends never stop asking themselves, What would Kafka do in our place? - for instance, when contemplating whether to move to another wine bar while the night is still young. But that’s the point - Kafka would never find himself in our place, they eventually conclude. Being a beardless teetotaller, he naturally wouldn’t.
Both characters entertain plans to escape - into music, Hinduism, Greek -–but these never take off. They do go on European trips though from time to time, and these palliative measures are mildly helpful. Here is an account of W.’s time in Germany: Morning to night, he drinks like a European. Steadily. That’s the secret.” Sitting in Continental bars, talking to each other about the End Times and all things apocalyptic, the friends dream, for a moment, that [they] are real European intellectuals. When Lars develops a cough, his hope strengthens: “Perhaps I’ll become tubercular and that will be the making of a true European intellectual.”
Kafka’s legacy inevitably brings the conversation to Max Brod, so unselfish in his promotion of Kafka, yet so given to a vague and general pathos, [who] has always served as both our warning and our example. The narrative is, in fact, based on doubles - you are told that even the figure of the Messiah, which is constantly being evoked, is traditionally doubled. The characters themselves are no longer sure who is who in their tandem, a sense that is supported by Iyer’s apt use of third and first person. After much musing, W. declares: “We are Brod and Brod and neither of us is Kafka.”
It is, indeed, a cleverly written book, masking deep ideas - and you’ll have to read it in full for these I’m afraid -–behind endless banter. You are bombarded with aphorisms in the spirit of the pedestrian is the true proletarian.The penetrating damp in Lars’ house calls for a Talmudic inquiry. It is a symbol, needless to say - whole religions have formed around less, so you stumble from damp returning to damp to a golem of damp, to, erm, damp dreams. And if W.’s crie de coeur, ‘Brods without Kafka, and what’s a Brod without a Kafka?’is a bit repetitive, his ‘Give me a sense the world’s about to end’is really uplifting.
Anyway, all this incessant chatter can get tedious, even in a slim book like this, but somehow it doesn’t. Iyer pulls it off helped by humour, and the reader happily trips over yet another joke each time the narrative becomes too heavy on ideas. The importance of humour in many things, from sex to DIY, has often been stressed, but I don’t recall anyone easing it into philosophy with such elegance. Perhaps that’s what this new movement is about - the bearded thinkers are manifestly cheerful and ply their trade without putting on their serious philosopher’s hat.
W. the ideologue sees their path through the apocalyptic towards the messianic, which will involve a lot of drinking, preferably Polish-style (apparently, Poles know how to pace themselves, unlike our boozers). Messianism and mathematics are W.’s pet subjects, although he is the first to admit he understands little of the latter - no more than the German of the book he is meticulously studying. Large quantities of Plymouth Gin are consumed during the pair’s conversations, on the rocks, no mixer mentioned, which may be the tipple to go for if you are pioneering something of this kind. There may even be a European tinge to it: while I never figured out what is that clear stuff Parisian intellectuals drink in their street cafes first thing in the morning, a friend assures me it’s gin, difficult though it is to believe.
The anxiety you feel about W.’s appearance builds up towards the end as you learn of his alarmingly hermitic habits. After all the suspense, it is a relief to find out on that he now looks increasingly “Talmudic […] with his beard and long ringlets” - it makes you want to pat yourself on the head for such insightful trend-spotting. You’ve guessed it, you’ve discovered it before everyone else has, this new European way to philosophise: grow a beard, book a budget flight, get some drinks in, interchange each sip with bite-sized wisdoms; above all, don’t take yourself too seriously, let the others do it for you. And don’t forget: for every two hirsute Brods there is a clean-shaven Kafka." - Anna Aslanyan
"While reading Lars Iyer’s recently released novel Spurious I had the curious feeling that he had somehow hacked my Gmail account and read the by-now-countless conversations I’ve had with my closest friends. My suspicion is, considering you lot keep coming around here, where posts untold were first given life in and left germs all over our respective chat archives, that if given the chance you’ll find Iyer cribbing from your conversations as well.
As with Beckett and Bernhard before him, nobody will be fooled by the apparent simplicity of Spurious. Two men, both reasonably intelligent academics, talk. And that is it, really. They talk on trains, on the phone, at the pub. There is talk of action, but no action as such. Well, no, that’s not quite true, is it? Talking is an action, too, after all. It may be more dull than, say, sex (one hopes), and more slow than a high-speed chase, but conversation, the simple being-with somebody else, is perhaps a more primal act than we, who are often bored with those with whom we have to spend time, might wish to believe. The main characters of Spurious, W. & Lars (the first-person narrator), are bound together in this primal act. They are, in fact, in talking, and I dare say only in talking, each other’s Messiah (149)—i.e., the (one) “to come” that “has come.” Fitting, perhaps, that the Messiah of a world such as ours should be so gloriously pitiful.
Throughout much of the novel, when he is not drunk, W. suffers from myriad sicknesses from which he only finds excuses not to work enough and never sufficient inspirational power to work only (i.e., to turn sickness into work itself), rendering him, he claims, very much unlike the true thinkers of old, for whom sickness and thought were indistinguishable. The only suffering his thought brings him is that borne of its (the suffering’s and the thought’s) inadequacy. For his part, Lars suffers from the debilitating promise of a sickness that is both present and not-yet present. While Lars is the foil of W.’s abusive accusations of stupidity, laziness, and cultural debasement, none of which Lars is quick to dispute, it is Lars’ sickness that provides physical form to the world in which they both live: that of the “the damp.” The walls of Lars’ kitchen, and increasingly (& eventually) his entire flat, are mysteriously wet—no expert can fathom how or why and no solution rendered. All they know is that it is coming from within the walls themselves, from between the brick exterior and plastered interior, and that it is growing; and that in growing, it is alive with spores and mold; and that in being alive, it promises only death. Money can be thrown at solving the problem, contractors consulted, etc., but is the damage already done by its having already lived? Indeed, this, too, is the question for W. & Lars, and it is one to which W., at least, believes he knows the answer:
Of course, I should take my life immediately, that would be the honourable thing, W. says. I should climb the footstool to the noose . . . But it would already be too late, that’s the problem, W. says. The sin has already been committed. The sin against existence, against the whole order of existing things. (31)
The solution to life, its cessation, as it were, always comes too late. An individual’s participation in and perpetuation of the problem, indeed, the embodiment of the problem, is both the reason for and reason against taking one’s life. There are no adequate amends to be made, only apologies.
It’s all our fault, isn’t it? The whole thing is our problem in some way, as though we were behind everything. Yes, we’re responsible. We’re resigned to it: we’re not just part of the problem, we are the problem.
The road is blocked—our road, everyone’s road. We should just get out of the way. But how can we get out of the way of ourselves? We should throw ourselves off the cliffs, we agree... But what good would it do, our bodies prone and bloody on the rocks, seagulls pecking out our eyes? How could we apologise then? Because that’s what we ought to do—we should spend our whole lives saying nothing but sorry: sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, and to everyone we meet. Sorry for what we’re doing, and what we’re about to do, sorry for what we’ve done... Who would be there to say that for us if we jumped from the cliffs? (127)
Okay, so, don’t get me wrong. For all this admittedly morbid stuff, the book is very funny. I’m not sure I’d call it “dark humor,” though. For starters, at the end of the day, if humor isn’t dark is it really all that funny? After all, even the stupidest physical humor is premised on somebody falling down or some other kind of physically violent contortion. More importantly, though, in the case of Spurious the humor doesn’t shine in spite of the bleakness but precisely because of it. You will laugh, and unlike most dark humor where the intention is that you feel a little weird for having laughed, Iyer betrays no sense that you should feel the least bit weird doing so. I laughed, for example, at the constant abuse heaped on Lars not only because in it I saw how I treat my own friends, but also because the true, eventual target of W.’s scathing comments is himself.
It’s our fault, it’s all our fault, we should at least admit that, W says. It’s our fault and particularly mine. My fault, W. says, because my existence couldn’t help but contaminate his. And his fault, somewhat at least, because he continues to allow his existence to be contaminated by mine.
But what can we do about it? To whom should we apologise? Each other? I should certainly apologise to him, W. says. I owe him a lifetime of apologies. But doesn’t he owe me an apology, too? Doesn’t he, by his continual presence in my life, perpetuate the disaster?
He gives me license, W. says. He gives me encouragement—but why? In the end, perhaps I’m only a figment of his imagination, a kind of nightmare, he says. Can’t you see I’m burning?, I ask him in his dream. But in the end, he’s burning, W. says. He’s the one who set himself on fire. (32)
The above quote does a lot of very heavy lifting, I think, and provides strong evidence that Iyer is not merely some blogger-philosopher “playing” author. (I’ve not actually ever seen that accusation, but my cynicism is such that I expect others are far more silently cynical than even I.) Throughout Spurious, one has to pay close attention to the use of quotation marks. Sometimes W. is explicitly quoted, whereupon he will refer to himself as “I.” Other times, and far more commonly, Lars is citing (but not quoting) W., and will, as such, dispense with the punctuational pretense of quoting his friend. Rarely is there prolonged confusion as to who is the appropriate referent, but there was, for me anyway, cause for a certain hesitation and re-reading or glancing ahead to make sure I wasn’t misdirecting things. The result is that the mutual “contamination” between W. & Lars mentioned above is played out in our reading about it. Iyers’ professional research on the aesthetic philosophy of Maurice Blanchot may even allow us to venture one further: that because such a practice forces a heightened investment and attention on the part of the reader to the relatively mundane, “mechanical” aspects of writing—punctuation, grammar, etc.—the very process of our reading itself highlights a similar “contamination” between the reader & the novel. If that is so, apologies are in order all around (mea culpa): so goes the infinite conversation...
Fortunately, the contamination/conversation with Spurious is very much worth it. I recommend it without reservation." - Brad Johnson
"Spurious began life as a blog, and its genesis shows: the chapters are short, like blogposts, and the consistency of voice and repetition of themes both emphasises and distracts the reader from the fact that there is not much directional plot. There is a little bit of plot, about damp growing in the narrator’s home (“The greatest experts on damp are completely baffled”), but a real plot would be unwelcome here. It would have driven me on and prevented me from stopping on almost every page to smile, think, or sense a cartoon lightbulb of understanding begin to glow above my head before popping out just as I concentrated on it. (With a plot, the lightbulb would never even have got going.) Instead, it has a spiral narrative – a Spirograph narrative! – turning on itself so you can see the same things passing over and over, a little closer or further away, from a different angle or level of familiarity.
Spurious is full of paradox. It’s about everything and nothing. It’s a funny book which uses exclamation marks (I know!). It provokes thought while evading easy understanding. Its characters speak simply about knotty concepts. The characters are the narrator, Lars, and his friend W. Most of what Lars tells us is reporting what W. says to him: we know more of what W. thinks than of what Lars does. W. speaks his mind (and Lars speaks W.’s mind too): “‘When did you know,’ W. says with great insistence. ‘When did you know you weren’t going to amount to anything?’” He is relentlessly critical of Lars. “It’s my fault, W. says. Everything went wrong when he met me.” But the lightness of touch, the artfulness in the repetition, means that it sounds not like bullying but an exaggerated, hyperreal version of banter between friends.
The conversations are short but feel like excerpts from one never-ending exchange, like arcs cut from a circle. Subjects and people recur: Béla Tarr, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Rosenzweig. Not mentioned, but all over the book, are Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett. The narrative container of Lars reporting W.’s thoughts is pure Old Masters, and Vladimir and Estragon could not be more simultaneously comic and tragic. “These are the end times, but who knows it but us?” Lars asks. Still, cheer up:
W. and I never think about our deaths or anything like that. That would be pure melodrama. Besides, if we died, others would come along to replace us. Our position is structural, we’ve always been convinced of that. We’re only signs or syndromes of some great collapse, and our deaths will be no more significant than those of summer flies in empty rooms.
Also appearing through the book is Kafka. “Our lives each took a wrong turn when we opened The Castle. It was quite fatal: there was literature itself! We were finished.” Lars and W. define themselves by what they will never live up to. W. hopes that his regular bouts of ill-health will give him the genius of a Kafka. “But W.’s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.” Ultimately Lars and W. recognise that neither of them is Kafka, they are both Max Brod, whom they revere for rescuing Kafka’s works, and revile for his “stupid” commentaries on Kafka’s works. (Brod, like Lars and W., was no Kafka.) “‘But we’re essentially joyful,’ says W., ‘that’s what will save us.’” And they are: what Lars and W. represent is an endless intellectual curiosity, on everything from messianism to Peter Andre (though the pop cultural references for me were the least funny part of the book). Such interest in things can only ever be bright-eyed and vigorous, and funny even when it’s horrible. “‘Go on, tell me,’ says W., getting excited. ‘How fat are you now?’”
Lars and W. travel in the book, mostly from the south-west of England where W. lives to the north-east, Lars’s home. But they may as well stay in the same room, conversing all the time. What W. wants is for every conversation to be “something great, something life-changing.” His fantasy is “a group of friends who could make one another think.” He longs for “the twenty-second century, or the twenty-third, when things might start getting better again.” He wants all conversations “to go from the apocalyptic to the messianic.” He is insufferable, but inseparable from Lars. They are like two aspects of the same character, the warring mind of someone who acknowledges his limitations but nags at himself for accepting them.
How far apart, too, are the author and his characters? So far I have written about Spurious as though there was no author, so effectively does the book have its own life. Iyer has given an interview where he explains the origins of the blog and the novel, though I am trying to forget it as it imposes too much on my own reading. Anyway, when W. has a book published toward the end of Spurious, Lars agrees that “His book is better than him.” Writers suffer illness, get distracted, talk rubbish. Their books endure. Lars fears “the empty time which makes thought possible.” Spurious is fully attuned to our times, where thought is impossible because of our inability to stay off Twitter, and with no empty time we never properly think. W. wants friends who can make him think. Too bad: he will just have to make do with books that can be friends, books that make you think and entertain you at the same time, like this one." - John Self
“W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts towards the end of his great study of Jewish mysticism,” says Lars, the narrator of Spurious, late in the book. W., Lars’s unnamed friend, goes on to retell Scholem’s story of the four Rabbis: The first goes to the woods, builds a fire, meditates, prays, and the difficult task he hopes to achieve is accomplished. Three more Rabbis follow, but, with each passing generation, knowledge of the first Rabbi’s ways is gradually lost: first, how to light the fire, then how to say the prayers, and, finally, which spot to visit in the woods. The last Rabbi says, in Iyer’s words, “We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done.” W. moves Scholem’s story one generation further: “There was a fifth rabbi Scholem forgot—well, he wasn’t really a rabbi, says W. His name is Lars, about whom all too much is known. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task.… He set fire to himself and his friend W. with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of days.”
Iyer’s twist on Scholem’s parable is a perfect microcosm of his debut novel: a humorous, devastated tale of obsession with philosophy, one that engenders the feeling that the moment for serious thinking has long since passed. Scholem details the gradual attenuation of a type of knowledge for which we might nevertheless find a sufficient substitute in storytelling. Iyer’s novel is about the attenuation of knowledge without recompense. In that sense, it’s about the apocalypse.
The dread in Spurious has something in common with the novels of Thomas Bernhard, though it’s funnier dread. Mostly, Lars just parrots his own cosmic inadequacy, as pointed out to him by W.: “As we look out to sea, a great shadow seems to move under the water. He can see it, says W.—‘Look: the kraken of your idiocy.’” W. and Lars are like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, if Vladimir were the most withering member of Estragon’s tenure committee.
The two friends, beaten-down professors of higher education, are stuck in the academic hamster-wheel: making conference presentations, wheedling grants, and publishing unreadable books full of typos and misprints that nobody will read anyway. Still, they read Jewish mystics and wait for their own Messiah, a Kafka to whom they could attach themselves as Max Brods, whose works they can publish “piece by piece for a grateful humanity, with our stupid editorial comments that generations of scholars would read to one another in disgust and amusement.” Midway through the novel, Lars discovers that a damp mold has begun to eat through his plaster walls, shorting out his electricity—one more sign of the apocalypse of damp, pervading stupidity. He spends the novel searching for illumination, only to find he can’t keep the lights on in his own house.
True to its interest in Messianism and Jewish mysticism, Spurious is, finally, a book about waiting. W. and Lars wait, as Beckett’s characters do, as Kafka’s do. It might also be a book about salvation, about joy—unless salvation is impossible, and joy another symptom of idiocy. This novel has a seductive way of always doubling back on itself, scorching the earth but extracting its own strange brand of laughter from its commitment to despair. In time, a sixth Rabbi might read it and believe there is something left for us to know, stories for us to tell, even after the world has burned." —Casey Walker
In Spurious, Lars Iyer, a blogger and Maurice Blanchot scholar, explores the absurd and dysfunctional extremes of male bonding. Evoking literary duos like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Othello and Iago, Iyer's portrait of two insufferable academics fumbling for enlightenment illustrates what the author comically calls the most honorable cruelty: friendship.
More dramaturgic than narrative, Spurious focuses on the prolix conversations of two supercilious Canadian critical theorists, W. and Lars, as they meander across Europe and sift through the history of continental philosophy. W., appropriately christened, in the high-modernist tradition of Kafka, as a single letter, is the alpha male—a pompous authority on German existentialism (though from Toronto, he considers himself "old European") who regrets his seduction by the novel, preferring the inviolability of calculus and God. Lars, on the other hand, is slovenly and undisciplined; his only redeeming trait, according to his best friend, is a total lack of shame. While W. pontificates, Lars can only muse; while W. aspires to "genius," Lars is content with his low-level academic status. To W., the only thing more despicable than Lars's mental and physical languor is his modest domicile, unkempt and lately infested with mold—a portent of something sinister for the frustrated existentialist. "You are the sign of the End," W. announces to his friend mockingly, with the apocalyptic drama of a Talmudic prophet.
In fact, religion, or the incessant need to discuss it, provides much of the wink-wink humor in Spurious. W. and Lars hash over religious anxieties largely forgotten in contemporary letters: the coming of the Messiah, the death of God, the categorical imperative, and mathematical mysticism, all discourses supposedly purged in the existential fires of Heidegger, Jaspers, Levinas, and Kafka. Neither scholar belongs wholly to the postcontemporary zeitgeist, so their anachronistic conversations are recycled ad nauseam, like a tragicomic illustration of Nietzsche's eternal return. Iyer writes these exchanges in the style of a schizoid Laurel and Hardy routine, sometimes to sardonic effect. "How has it come to this?" W. constantly asks, one foot planted in the past and the other hovering in midflight above the apocalypse. Lars, in the role of bemused idiot, is dutifully quiet. "We're fucked, everything's fucked," W. cries. He then backpedals: "But we're essentially joyful... that's what will save us." Meanwhile, Lars can only manage lines like, "Do you love me?"
Solipsistic and chatty, Spurious is a comedy in the vein of Bernhard's The Loser or Beckett's The Unnameable. Echoes of "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" haunt every scene. But unlike those forebears, Iyer's caustic parody suffers from a reliance on a single shtick—the ridicule of ideologues—and the joke begins to seem like sketch comedy. It's as though Iyer were rehearsing W. and Lars for some slapstick colloquium, an event that, appropriately, we wait for but never arrives. A book devoted almost entirely to the undermining of ideas, Spurious too often gets stuck in its own head. For all its dialogue, it's hard not to feel like the book is talking only to itself." - Erik Morse
"Spurious is Lars Iyer’s debut novel, but not his first book – he’s published a couple of philosophy texts before – and it shows. This is a guy who knows his intellectual history; the novel is laden with references to Kafka, Tarkovsky, messianism, Bela Tarr, Rosenzweig, mathematical theory and more. Iyer’s narrator, Lars (just to get you thinking) and his ‘slightly more successful friend’, W, both writers and academics, wander back and forth across Europe and between their respective homes in Newcastle and Plymouth, railing against their professional and personal inadequacies, failures and fears. Or, at least, W. does; Lars is his sounding-board, his whippping-boy, his alter-ego – the Brod to his Kafka, as he keeps saying, before worrying that he’s also Brod, and there’s no Kafka at all. Lars, on the other hand, is more concerned with the toxic fungus that’s taking over his damp-riddled flat. And they’re both pretty worried about where the next drink is coming from.
So it’s a novel of ideas; a meandering and repetitive exploration of ennui, angst and booze as the two of them talk and exchange notes and make and break all manner of self-improvement plans. And, okay, it sounds bleak and overly intellectual and maybe a little stifling. And in some ways, it is – this isn’t one for somebody looking for a plot in their books. But Iyer manages to intersperse all the philosophical debates with brilliant flashes of humour – there’s a discussion about man-bags that had me laughing out loud – and because W. is constantly retracing the same debates, digging through his own thought-processes and insulting Lars along the way, the Godot-esque sameness of his diatribes becomes funnier as it goes along. And Spinoza shares page-space with Peter Andre; our heroes worry about their flowery shirts when everybody else is wearing black; they compare illnesses and get stressed about how few foreign languages they can speak – being able to read them doesn’t, apparently, count. If you’re getting bogged down by the heavier discussions, you can be sure the author won’t allow it to become too serious; W. will puncture the intellectual bubble by launching into a rant about the damning size of his friend’s belly. The chapters are very short, too, so despite the lack of any actual action, the book moves along quickly. The book started life as a blog, and many of the chapters were posted there, both before and after the book’s publication date, so that gives a sense of the digestible size of each entry/section (and gives you a chance to try before you buy).
W. is sure that we’ve reached the End Times, that he and Lars are witnessing the beginning of the apocalypse. He seems to mainly base this conclusion on Jewish and mathematical texts he has trouble decoding, and on his own lack of intellectual prowess, so it’s hard to take him seriously – but Iyer shores it up with the parallel story of Lars’ encroaching damp and mould. ‘I’m stranded in space between the armies of damp’, he tells W. And as W.’s sense of foreboding increases, so the mould advances, until Lars says, ‘I think it’s speaking through me, a word of damp from within, in my frosty, spore-filled breath and in every line I write.’ Although Lars is our narrator, the story he tells is W.’s in reported dialogue, and Lars himself is a mostly silent witness as well as the victim of his friend’s savage portrait of him – yet, if Lars is right, and the alien, poisonous damp is speaking through him, perhaps we’re not really hearing W. at all, but an actual apocalyptic voice as the fungus takes over… So Spurious is not only learned and funny, but kind of scary, too. The descriptions of the damp and its takeover of Lars’ home reminded me of Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, with its poetic and repulsive descriptions of decay and entropy.
But maybe even more than the apocalypse or the impossibility of serious thought, Spurious is about friendship; W.’s complaints and critiques and insults mask a deep love for his friend Lars, a love that binds them together and lets them rise above the pretty awful circumstances of their lives (or, their lives as W. sees them – he’s got a nice house and a decent wife and at least two books published, after all). At the beginning we hear that Lars is a terrible influence on W., that he speaks ‘unending bilge’; at the end we see that their friendship is the foundation of everything: ‘But perhaps the plain is the friendship between us on which we are both lost, he says.’ So maybe not all is lost, despite the damp, despite their failures, despite their drunkenness and lack of ideas – they’ve still got each other, and they’ll still carry on.
Any Cop?: It’s definitely in the avant-garde corner of the ring, so I’d steer clear if you’re in the market for a rom-com or a nicely-plotted crime story. But it’s got such a great balance of the serious and thought-provoking (Kafka pops up everywhere), the bodily grotesque (digestive complaints, anyone?), and the bitingly funny references to contemporary culture, that I bet more of you will fall for it than you’d think." - Valerie O’Riordan
"Lars Iyer’s Spurious, based on the popular blog spurious.typepad.com, brings us into the relationship between the narrator, Lars, and his former professor, W. Lars and W. are colleagues yet W. always retains the upper hand in the relationship, belittling Lars constantly and reminding him of his own success as compared with Lars’s failures.
W., a pretentious, self-proclaimed thinker, reader, and writer, occasionally has moments of self-doubt and vulnerability in an otherwise narcissistic personal universe. He takes every possible opportunity to abuse Lars about his writing, lifestyle, lack of intelligence, wasted potential, and weight, even declaring that Lars will eventually need to wear elasticized trousers like those of American professors. W.’s obsession with messianism leads him to spend countless hours reading books he does not comprehend, traversing his life of self-declared intellectualism with his lion’s mane of ringlets and a manbag full of life’s necessities.
The duo travels quite frequently, drinking and discussing their shortcomings, alternating between highs of satisfaction with their intelligence and lows of accepting their failures. They are constantly seeking a leader, and have actually had three unwilling examples, to expand their lives and pull them along into a new intellectual realm.
Lars’s life is complicated by the intense, rare mold that is taking over every inch of his flat, damply weighing down on his emotions, furniture, and lungs. He makes halfhearted attempts to fix his flat as the mold threatens to leave him homeless. He calls in several experts, who are completely baffled by this hostile takeover, but he is mostly content to live in a moldy, unhealthy environment. It becomes a race against nature’s clock as W. harasses Lars to get some work done every day while Lars wonders if his moldy home will collapse around his coughing shoulders at any given moment.
Iyer has given us an anti-climactic novel about the dangers of complacency, with an amusing friend/abuser in the pretentious W. The relationship between W. and Lars has moments of harsh verbal criticism, tempered with some of tender concern between friends, and a white elephant of mold." - Tatiaana L. Laine
"Spurious is a novel of the rambling misadventures of W. and his sidekick/acolyte/protégé/collaborator, Lars. They travel about a bit -- in Europe and England --, they go for walks, but mostly they just go in circles. They have great ambition (well, W. says he does; Lars is a pretty hopeless case from the get-go), but little follow-through; they set themselves goals and don't even come close - they just fall flat, over and over and over.
W. and Lars are of the intellectual class, but they're overwhelmed by the realization that they are not true thinkers. They aspire to an existence on this higher plane, but it is beyond them -- and what frustrates them is how keenly aware they are of the fact that it is beyond them. W. repeatedly tries to immerse himself in true thought -- tackling (or at least going through the motions of doings so) Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption or higher mathematics -- but he doesn't find he gets anywhere with it.
Kafka is an ideal for them -- but an unreachable and hence also devastatingly disheartening one. But if not Kafka then they at least aspire to follow a thinker of Kafka's magnitude; instead, all they have is each other. "Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod ? W. muses", but it's not a serious question: W. has already relegated Lars to the position of disciple (i.e. he can not possibly qualify for the Kafkaesque-position) -- but W. realizes he can't either:
We're both Brod, he says, and that's the pity of it. Brod without Kafka, and what's a Brod without a Kafka ?
This identity-crisis is compounded by their intellectual crises (as well as the occasional real-world concerns: W. worries about the 'End of Times'; Lars worries, more mundanely, about his sopping, mildewed walls, practically weeping water, regardless of what steps he takes). They recognize the importance of thought -- that abstract, intellectual ideal -- but also recognize that it is out of their reach:
We cultivate the external signs of thinking, W. says. We can do good impressions of thinkers, he says, but we're not thinkers. We've failed at the level of thought.
But at least they have each other - even if: "A few days in my company, says W., and he feels iller than he's ever felt."
It's an odd relationship they have, and difficult to explain:
W. has thought up many excuses for me. He's had to account for me at length to his friends. Explain him !, they demand. What's going on ? And W. has to explain, as best, how it all started, how our collaboration began.
But what can he say, really ? There's a limit to every explanation, which is to say to the sheer physical fact of my existence. There you are, says W. And before that fact, what can anyone do but shrug?
It's also a relationship that is both competitive and mutually supportive (in a bizarre sort of way). W. constantly rubs in how he his, if not a true thinker either, at least a bit smarter, a bit more driven.
Typically:
'What time did you get up to work this morning ? says W. Five. - 'I was up at four. At four !', W. says.
Why Lars puts up with the frequently condescending -- and always superior (even as he wallows in his own inferiority) W. - is not entirely clear; this is Lars' account, but the focus is largely on W. and his wisdom (or whatever it is he's spouting). Of course, sometimes Lars seems just to be trying to get W.'s goat, playing Doom on his mobile phone, or reading about Katie Price and Peter Andre in some gossip magazine...
Spurious is an amusing take on intellectual frustration and anomie, its two characters going through the motions in a world where its unclear what the right motions are any longer. It's not like W. and Lars aren't onto something - yet those limbs they venture out on offer little support (or satisfactions). Occasionally they'll resort to excesses of drink and food (Lars is apparently quite rotund), but it's the intellectual sphere they want to lose themselves in -- but as they try they largely find themselves lost in the entirely wrong way, flailing for some hold which eludes them.
They do have each other, less audience for each other than alter egos, and Spurious has much of the buddy-movie to it, with its pair of Laurel and Hardy academics struggling on the periphery.
Spurious is good, fun intellectual slapstick -- even if it's constantly failed protagonists only get readers so far." - M. A. Orthofer
"Spurious (which began life as a blog) consists of a series of short, loosely connected chapters that generally concentrate on the sometimes lofty, often base pronouncements of a character named W.
"You should do a book, says W., if only so I can hear you whine. I like it when you whine in your presentations. Like a stuck pig, crying out! No, it's more plaintive than that. Like a sad ape. A sad ape locked up with his faeces."
The person to whom "W." makes this typically delightful suggestion is called "Lars Iyer" – and that's not the only thing he has in common with the author of Spurious. "Lars Iyer", like Lars Iyer, is an academic living in the north-east of England. He has done extensive studies on Blanchot. He is also capable, as he states in this book – and as this book also proves – of "moments of illumination". In these moments, W. says, "the clouds do clear… You manage to speak sense… or something like sense."
What this "sense" amounts to is a moot point – and one of the many pleasurably confounding questions in the novel. When John Self reviewed the book he described feeling a "cartoon lightbulb of understanding begin to glow above my head before popping out just as I concentrated on it." I know precisely what he means. Or rather, I understand his feeling for the imprecision of the book – and its fleeting moments of "illumination". Iyer gives us enough to think we can grasp the truth – but the truth always eludes us.
So is the author the same person as the narrator? In some ways, perhaps. But then, how are we really to know? And can anyone have lived, as Iver does, in a house so full of damp that he can hear the water flow and his walls have turned brown, then black, then pink, then produced mushrooms? Can he have a real friend as wonderfully rude as W.? Does it matter, anyway? He gives us clues, but no answers. Especially on the matter of "sense", he confounds us. W. himself claims that when those clouds clear and Lars Iyer does seem to make sense it is probably just "the usual pathos and hot air".
Elsewhere, W. is less complimentary:
"What's that name Hollywood directors use when they want to disclaim involvement with a film… that's how you should sign your work."
"Food's a gift, W. says. The greatest of gifts, which I desecrate every time I visit him."
"What are the signs of the End?, I ask W. – 'You. You are a sign of the End', says W."
"When I die, W. says he's going to be my literary executor. Delete, delete, delete, that's what he's going to do."
It's wonderful. I'd recommend the book for its insults alone. But there's more to it than caustic wit. For a start, by some indefinable alchemy, the ruder W. is to Iyer, the more loving he begins to seem. It becomes a touching testament to friendship – and to the charm of extreme rudeness. There are real insights into these struggling minds. Almost in passing, it explains W.'s and Iyer's unremarkable careers as academic philosophers, the satisfaction they take from Europe and each other's houses in Plymouth and Newcastle (places W. likes because they are "peripheral" and "shit") and their doughty over-consumption of alcohol. There isn't much of a story arc, aside from that relating to the ever-growing damp problem in Iyer's flat. Even so, by the end, there's a strong sense that the characters have developed, moved on – or at least stubbornly resisted change. There's a strong sense of knowing them. Or thinking we know them.
Meanwhile, even if it never quite makes sense, there's always a feeling that the book is, as the reliable Steve Mitchelmore effuses on the back cover, "a profound philosophical rhapsody". The two men worry over End Times, finding purpose, staying sane in a disappointing world. In the end it leaves you no real answers, just more questions. It doesn't add up to much that you can hold. But that too is part of its charm. It's a book about failing – and then failing better. W. and Lars amount to nothing – and their tragedy is that they are fully aware of that fact. As W. says, they're clever enough to understand what it means to be great – but they will never achieve greatness: a thought that would be thoroughly depressing, except that is presented (like so much else in the book) with such lightness and wit. W. likes to say when he comes to one of his depressing conclusions, at just the wrong moment: "We're essentially joyful. That's what will save us."
That – and the fact that the two men are so very entertaining. At one point, surveying the chaos at the back of Iver's house, W. brings up an alternative vision:
"Béla Tarr would discern what is absolute about my yard, W. says. He'd register every detail in a twenty minute tracking shot. The sewage, the concrete, the bin bags and rotting plants … the yard would mean more to Béla Tarr than all our nonsense."
What W says is possibly true. Béla Tarr would find more meaning than you can hope to from Spurious. But then, his films are dull: agonisingly slow, even if you watch them (as I have done) on fast forward. Spurious, on the other hand, is joyful. I loved it." - Sam Jordison
"There was a time some years ago when it began to rain in my apartment. I was eighteen, living alone in a large city, going to school all day and working all evening; distracted, in other words, and perhaps not as on-the-ball as I should have been when the shower started dripping. The drip turned into a permanent stream of scathingly hot water, and then the bathroom, being small and virtually airtight—neither of the apartment’s windows opened—filled with steam.
Steam, of course, condenses into water, and within a day or two the bathroom had turned almost subtropical. Raindrops fell gently from the ceiling; paint bubbled; water slid down the walls and pooled in the corners; a mushroom appeared in an unreachable corner. I imagined the damage being done to the paint job was irreparable, but this struck me as a reasonable trade-off for the landlord’s failure to do anything about the cockroaches.
All this to say that I feel some kinship with Lars, the narrator of Lars Iyer’s Spurious, a debut novel and a meditation on friendship, failure, the apocalypse, messianism, and mold. Lars’ apartment is being overtaken by a mysterious damp, something altogether darker and more sinister than the indoor rain I dealt with in Toronto all those years ago, originating from somewhere within his kitchen wall. Brown waves of damp spread over the plaster. The wall is wet to the touch. Florid mold blooms in patches and spores drift through the air. Water can be heard rushing somewhere behind the bricks. Experts in the field are baffled.
The damp, it seems, might be symptomatic of larger problems. Specifically, the world is coming to an end. Lars is a writer, as is his “slightly more successful” friend W., and they’re united by, among other things, the certainty that we’re living in the End of Times. It isn’t the easiest of friendships—“One of us is dragging the other down, W. and I decide, but which one? Is it him or me?”—but there’s a certain amount of shared history. They’ve been friends for a while now:
W. remembers when I was up and coming, he tells me. He remembers the questions I used to ask, and how they would resound beneath the vaulted ceilings. —‘You seemed so intelligent then’, he says. I shrug. ‘But when any of us read your work…’, he says, without finishing the sentence.
Lars and W. are oddly inseparable, despite W.’s fondness for peppering Lars with verbal abuse. He does it out of love, he says. (“‘Yes, I love you’, says W. ‘You see, I can talk about love. I can express my feelings. Not like you’.”)
They are somewhat obsessed with Kafka, although since theirs is a literary friendship, considerations of Kafka raise an unsettling question: which one of them is Kafka, and which one of them is Max Brod? They might both be Brods. It’s a possibility. Actually, it seems increasingly probable. They’re stuck in the End of Times, and they are neither the men nor the intellectuals whom they’d like to be. “’Compare our friendship,’
says W., ‘to that of Levinas and Blanchot’. Of their correspondence, only a handful of letters survive. Of ours, which takes the form of obscenities and drawings of cocks exchanged on Microsoft Messenger, everything survives, although it shouldn’t. Of their near daily exchanges, nothing is known; of our friendship, everything is known, since I, like an idiot, put it all on the internet.
It’s true, he did put it all on the internet. Spurious originated as a blog.
They aspire to think truly original thoughts, Lars and W., but also, they want to be led. They long for meaning, for direction, for better gin. They are mentorless, and they would like to find a guide through the intellectual wilderness. It isn’t that they’ve been unable to find one—they’ve gone through three leaders so far—but Lars and W. make the same misstep each time. Each time they find a leader they go and tell him that he’s their leader, at which point the leaders understandably distance themselves.
They suspect that if one of them were to have a truly original thought, just one, that might elevate them and change everything. This hasn’t happened yet, and they’re adrift and painfully aware of their shortcomings in a world that seems to them to have come undone; despite this, they’re “essentially joyful,” and the book has a marvelous lightness of touch. In the meantime, something terrible is happening in Lars’ apartment. If the world’s moving toward the end of days, the apartment’s headed there even faster.
The book’s flaw is its insistence on repetition. Several things are mentioned two or three times, and it’s not at all clear to me that the repetition serves the work. We know that W.’s friends prefer W.’s girlfriend Sal to W., for instance, because we’re told this twice. On the same page.
But the repetition is a minor qualm. Iyer has a remarkable control of tone. It’s the End of Times, the narrator and the only other character in the book ache with self-disgust, most of the text is concerned with Lars and W.’s endless yammering, there are chapters about mold. The kind of book, in other words, that sounds like it ought to be unreadable, but manages to be intelligent, wildly entertaining, and unexpectedly moving instead." - Emily St. John Mandel
"Friendship demands one expose oneself, or better, that one allow oneself to be exposed in the ecstasis that does not permit us to remain mired in tautology. - Lars Iyer, Blanchot’s Communism
Spurious cannot be reviewed like the books of so many dead authors, or even so many living ones. Lars Iyer is a blogger whose site is named Spurious, and now he has published a book named Spurious with a narrator named Lars. The book relates closely to the blog in content, in style, and in spirit. (It shares little in common with his two academic books on the French writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, however.) Some of the content from the book has appeared on the blog as daily entries, before and even after the book was published.
I am a blogger as well. We share some of the same tastes: Thomas Bernhard, Bela Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky, Smog. Lars and I were both anonymous bloggers for a time. We did not want a public persona influencing our reader’s impressions of our work. Now we are not anonymous. I decided it was futile. Just ask Tao Lin. By signing up with Melville House, Tao Lin’s publisher, I gather Lars agrees.
Those who take Spurious the blog, and thus Spurious the book, as a pathetic intellectual burlesque are missing the great complexity offered by each. It is a subtle complexity, obscured by misdirection. But the richness in the book is available to those who let themselves be misdirected and then misdirect themselves. It takes some effort on the part of the reader to unsituate him or herself, however. Because this book does read like a sequence of blog posts on Spurious, and because it plays on the border between fiction and non-fiction like so many blogs, it demands a different sort of reading than one would give a novel that comes with nothing but a name attached. The chorus of Larses in the book, the blog, and Iyer’s interviews speak with greatly overlapping voices. But listen to this chorus of David’s and all will be made clear.
Stylistically, Iyer seems to be writing in a tradition that draws on an obsessive concern with the minutiae of language, not minimalism as much as pointillism, making every gesture apparent even as it is part of the gestalt. One thinks of some of the authors mentioned in Spurious: Beckett, Blanchot, Bernhard, as well as Rene Crevel. There is also the contemporary writer Gabriel Josipovici, who strongly shows Blanchot’s influence in his sparse, echoing fiction. Like Blanchot, he works with the most minimal of collateral indicators, trying to bring out through small repetition and variation the tremendous power of language. By contrast, Beckett was the most prodigious at this sort of language-work, but he generally operated at a higher level of abstraction and with a more absurdist sensibility. The others on this list work with recognizably human situations, albeit ones shorn of all but the most significant particulars.
Iyer brings a far lighter touch and broad humor to Blanchot and Josipovici’s approach. In so doing, he creates a more personable, human comedy in place of Beckett’s scatology and burlesque, resulting in a deadpan tone reminiscent of George Perec’s materialist 1960s comedy Things. In Spurious, the narrator and W. travel around Europe while discussing various angst-ridden intellectual matters. Life details are mostly elided in favor of existential generalizations. The narrator and W. like the sort of deeply serious art that another blogger friend of mine once described, not inaccurately, as “dopey”: Andrei Tarkovsky, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, Palace Music, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Creators who are searching, reaching, profound, bombastic. Rather masculine too: Lars and W. manage to go the whole book without discussing a single female. (Recommendation to Lars and W.: Simone Weil.)
I like some of those artists and writers too, though I have to wonder about anyone who seems to consume them so exclusively. To see why, let me give an example from Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death”:
But at the same time, a death that results in being represents an absurd insanity, the curse of existence—which contains within itself both death and being and is neither being nor death. Death ends in being: this is man’s hope and his task, because nothingness itself helps to make the world, nothingness is the creator of the world in man as he works and understands. Death ends in being: this is man’s laceration, the source of his unhappy fate, since by man death comes to being and by man meaning rests on nothingness.
This could read as either pompous nonsense or the deepest truth, depending on the day. One only truly gains from those mystics if one recognizes that, when imbibed in a less than melodramatically morose state, they must appear dopey. Relentless attraction to mystics who promise a Gnostic escape from the world is unhealthy, since the promise is always reneged upon.
Clearly, the narrator and W. have read too much Blanchot too frequently, for Blanchot, among others, only exists as a sort of superluminary, an unimpeachable authority to rank with the highest deities. They speak of Blanchot and their other heroes with a worshipful familiarity reminiscent of Pamela des Barres’ groupie memoir I’m with the Band. One wonders if this could be responsible for their plight, for, it is as though Vladimir and Estragon spent all of Waiting for Godot talking about what a great guy Godot was. It heightens the pomposity, and so W. and the narrator are always melodramatically morose. But frequently quite funny.
This is mostly a side issue, though. Like Monty Python’s invocations of Proust and Pasolini, the talk of these intellectual names and matters is not meant to require any knowledge of the source material beyond their being high-falutin’ names. (Most unlike, for example, Alan Bennett’s Bertrand Russell sketch in Beyond the Fringe, mostly constructed for fellow Oxbridgers.) The joke is the extent to which these names can be invoked in inappropriate, desultory, or trivializing ways. For example, one of my favorite bits:
W. reminds me of when I inspected his teaching. He drew diagrams for the students, two stick men. What was he explaining? Hegel and religion, he thinks.—”This is Lars,” he said, and drew a tiny cock on one of the stick men, “and this is me,” he said, and drew a huge cock on the other.
Cartoonist and New Yorker cover artist Ivan Brunetti was a master at this sort of humor, as when he described a new comic strip as “A neo-Sophoclean exegesis on the nature of morality, with subtle layers of epistemological subtext and not infrequent structural allusions to the novels of J.-K. Huysmans.” The title: “Grandma Farts Blood.” The narrator and W.’s relentless solipsism sometimes negates some of the intensity that makes this sort of rage so piercing, but when it connects, it’s hilarious.
A few of the particulars are important, however. Specifically, one is that the narrator is Hindu-affiliated in some way, whereas W. was raised Catholic by Jewish converts. W. talks about the Messiah and the apocalypse a fair bit, while pointing out that the narrator is exempt from the general framework:
But there’s no messianism in me whatsoever, W. acknowledges. I’m far beyond that. Some process has completed itself in me, he says. Something, a whole history has been brought to an end.
Not that it stops W.’s abuse. But W. does tend to assign the concept of infinity to the narrator’s domain. W. orientalizes the narrator, trying to turn him into an Other. W. himself doesn’t seem to know much about Hinduism; at one point he errs quite badly by mixing up Hinduism and Buddhism, though the narrator doesn’t bother to correct him.
The aforementioned W. is the domineering presence of Spurious, the top to the narrator’s bottom. He abuses the narrator relentlessly, who seems to take it mostly in stride, reporting it without affect, perhaps enjoying it. W. is quite catholic in his attacks: the narrator may be a shameless ignoramus who’s bad at Greek, but he is also a fatso with a small penis. W.’s voice seems to bleed into the narrator’s, as his direct discourse becomes indirect discourse and then spills into unassigned narration. Assorted riffs—on joy, the Messiah, seriousness, and others—repeat themselves with varying levels of attribution.
But the narrator’s exoticism, as W. perceives it, seems to wreck the comedy routine. W. is trying to do a sort of Jewish shtick with the narrator, but the narrator is a flat, inadequate straight man. Gordon Lish tried for this sort of tragicomedy at times in Extravaganza and My Romance, telling jokes that weren’t funny. But here one of the duo isn’t being helpful. There are two types of straight men: suckers and pricks. W. wants the narrator to be a sucker but he’d even settle for him being a prick. Since the narrator steadfastly refuses to be either, W. protests increasingly, but all he hears about is the rising damp that comes to take on more importance for the narrator than his conversations with W.
Aside from that one point, though, the intellectual stuff remains a prop. The two of them are having conversations about the pain of living and getting along with one another and the rest of humanity, and the intellectual accoutrements just happen to be their particular milieu. It is best not to pay too much attention to them, though Lars has compiled a helpful glossary on the Melville House website explaining the references for the curious.
And that umbilicus that connects the book to the Internet is what makes the book so odd, because the abstract narrator and the mysterious “Lars Iyer” take on so many more layers in its light. I can see Lars promoting his book online, and I can see that Lars has been reprinting
reviews of Spurious on his page. Lars seems an awful lot like the narrator. The back cover says that “Lars Iyer tells the story of a writer very like himself,” so that’s not just my imagination. I see that on Spurious, Lars has said of one review that “the critic hasn’t read the book closely, and is a bit of a show-off,” so I’d better watch out.
But is it Lars or the narrator who is commenting on the reviews? I don’t want to annoy either of them. One or the other may comment on this review, and then I’ll have to respond so that he won’t have the last word. Steve Mitchelmore, another literary blogger, calls Spurious a “profound philosophical rhapsody” in a blurb on the back. He recently called my blog a “pile of shit.” I want to title this review “PILE OF SHIT REVIEWS PROFOUND PHILOSOPHICAL RHAPSODY,” but I’m not sure Scott will agree. [Ed. note: as you can see, I agreed.]
My point is that a book like Spurious cannot be read, say, in the way that Lars and W. read Blanchot. Its characters are not Vladimir and Estragon. They are not Anne and Thomas the Obscure. They are anything but obscure. They are not even Krapp, Beckett’s most personable and seemingly autobiographical narrator, because Krapp was still an autonomous entity. I am sure that Lars knows this. I am sure that he also knows that the narrator and his friend W. may seem to be talking to each other in a vacuum, but are in fact talking to each other with an audience breathing down their neck. Perhaps not a large audience, but a far more present one than Beckett or Blanchot ever had. And so they know that no one (least of all me) is about to bend at the knee to them the way they do to Blanchot.
What about W.? He is so omnipresent both in the book and on the blog that he seems both larger than life and yet eerily real. And indeed, like the narrator, he has a real-life counterpart. The narrator drops enough particulars about W. that match a single, real person: William Large, also a philosophy professor, also the author of two books on Maurice Blanchot.
Now, this raises some peculiar issues. Lars has made it terribly easy to postulate Professor Large as W.’s counterpart. Whether or not he, in fact, is that counterpart, the trail that leads to his Internet doorstep is right there in the book, made trivial to follow. And the picture Lars has painted of W. is not flattering. He is a blowhard, a boor, and a bully. He seems far from happy, he repeats himself chronically, and he has a remarkable lack of self-awareness. He confuses Buddhism with Hinduism! He has a few moments of self-pity, particularly one in the dead middle of the book when W.’s wife expresses contempt for him and he goes on about how much better she is than him. “That’s why I abuse you—verbally, I mean,” he bleats to the narrator, “It’s a sign of love.” These moments are more pathetic than exculpatory.
W. is to William Large what the narrator is to Lars Iyer, at least according to Lars Iyer. We think that W.’s voice has been bleeding into the narrator’s, when really Lars’s voice has been bleeding into W.’s the whole time.
Who, then, is the bully here? On the one level, we have W. attacking the narrator for the two hundred pages of Spurious, while the narrator’s main faults seem to be restricted to being a glutton for punishment and having a problem with damp in his home. Yet Lars (at least one of the Larses) writes a book about W. recording the terrible things that he has said. We would not know this except for the trail pointing out of the book into real life. Perhaps these claims are not in fact true; perhaps Lars has written a slanderous roman-a-clef against an innocent man. There is cause for doubt. At one of the rare points where he speaks up, Lars makes a claim that he has “singled out” W. for “very special thanks” in his own book on Blanchot. But this is not true, for Lars gives merely “special thanks” to three people in Blanchot’s Communism, Large only one of them. Things do not look good for Lars.
M.A. Orthofer, another blogger, writes in his review of Spurious, “Why Lars puts up with the frequently condescending W. is not entirely clear.” I’m afraid it seems all too clear to me, once the metatextual legerdemain has been made decoded. The answer is the book itself. And is the book dedicated to its evident benefactor, William Large? Or even to W.? No, just to “Sinéad,” a figure privileged enough to go unmentioned in the text.
And so I wonder what poor W. (or Professor Large—the two are indistinct in my mind) must make of all of this, since if the fictional universe is to be extended to real life, poor W. is the butt of quite a big joke, much bigger than all the jokes that he makes at the narrator’s expense in Spurious. (Even if he is guilty of any of these sins, he has not even been given the chance to answer the accusations!) Lars, if he can be trusted, quoted “W.” in one of his posts on the Melville House blog:
It would seem that the book derives from conversations that Lars has recorded and put on his blog. Some of these conversations are fictional, W. protests: he claims not to recognise himself in everything Lars has written.
Shameless. I wrote to Professor Large, telling him I was reviewing Spurious, and did not receive a response. I can only hope that Professor Large will have his say in the already announced sequel to Spurious, Dogma, due in 2012. I hope Lars will give him the chance. In Friendship, Blanchot wrote:
How could one agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth. The traits of his character, the forms of his existence, the episodes of his life, even in keeping with the search for which he felt himself responsible to the point of irresponsibility, belong to no one.
No one, it seems, except Lars. I think of Shem and Shaun, the two brothers of Finnegans Wake. Shem is the perverse, sickly Dionysian brother, filthy, genitally obsessed, dark and weak. Shaun is the bold, strong, morally upright brother, the knight in shining armor. But for all of Shem’s pathetic antics, Shaun is a moralistic bully who beats up on his brother and humiliates him, rendering him a pariah. Shaun then gets the girls and the glory. The trick of this book is that W. is Shem, not Shaun.
When asked in an interview why W. is so cruel to the narrator, Lars himself replied:
Cruelty is one of the few ways in which some of us can show affection in Britain, much to the confusion of many Americans I’ve known. It’s what makes us laugh, for the most part, even if we’re the butt of the joke.
I suspect Professor Large knows exactly what he means." - David Auerbach
Interview by David Winters
Interview by Mark Thwaite
Interview at Biblioklept
Interview by Tom Cutterham
Interview at Full Stop
Lars Iyer, Dogma, Melville House, 2012.
Lars Iyer's blog
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