Finally the online adventures of Lars and W have been brought to print. For years I have followed the stories of these two friends, brought together by mutual failure, scathing insults, copious amounts of alcohol and conversations ending in blowholes. And now, I can enjoy these stories in succession, turning page after page to find new insults and more insights into these two hilarious minds.

Spurious, named after the author’s long running blog of the same name, is a stuttering narrative of friendship and idiocy. Through a hazy remembrance and nostalgia, Lars and W find their failure in one another, like a mirror into one singular disappointment.

W continually asks where it all went wrong for him. He can see Lars’s failure clearly, having bared witness to his idiocy for years. Lars never tried, not like W did. W had ambition; he was going to be somebody of note. He read for entire days, with nothing in his life but books and a bed. He taught himself German and meticulously worked translating dense philosophy from its native tongue. But somewhere along the line his failure began, a failure cemented when he met Lars. In Lars he sees the details of his failure, the lack of ambition and the utter meaninglessness of it all. Lars on the other hand, faces his failure each time he sees W, as the two settle into a quasi- doctor/patient relationship, in which W meticulously and brutally dissects Lars’s failures but without any resolve.

Whether they are drinking, at a conference, meeting people or travelling, they never escape their failure. Like a Blanchotian death, it hangs over them like an ominous cloud. But while driven by a sense failure and death, Spurious is a darkly hilarious book, self deprecating and brutally honest. It is an effortless read, written with great poise and confidence tht it leaves you wondering how this could be the work of such an idiot.

Ibitsu, Not the Booker Review