'Stupidity and Messianism': Ubaldo León Barreto reviews Spurious (in Spanish) in Rialta. Most insightful review of them all? A candidate, and not just because it's flattering. Here's a machine translation:

Walter Benjamin, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, writes: "Be that as it may, I imagine that whoever succeeds in discovering the comic aspects of Jewish theology would have in his possession the key to Kafka. Has this man ever existed? Would you dare to be skilled enough to be that man?" The strange, profoundly enigmatic intuition[1] of the great German literary critic, thinker and crypto-Kabbalist has obsessed countless first-rate intellects for decades: What exactly does it mean?: Kafka as a humorist?; Is the existence of comic elements in the almost infinite theological corpus of rabbinic Judaism even conceivable? Such perplexity is understandable: they are not exactly (at least at first glance) ideas that we can associate with the Czech narrator's grim parables, let alone with the great Talmudic tradition of dour, painstaking, insanely complex commentaries on the Torah. However, the difficulty of the fragment has not managed to dissuade (on the contrary, quite the opposite) dozens – perhaps hundreds – of accomplished exegetes who continue their hermeneutical work with admirable stubbornness… and derisory results: no philosopher or theorist has succeeded, I believe, in offering a more or less satisfactory explanation of Benjamin's apophthegm. Is it so abstruse that it defies any gloss? I do not think so: I suspect rather that the approach deployed by literary theory, philosophy, and even theology is probably not the most appropriate in this instance: only literature itself can, perhaps, respond effectively to such a challenge, provided that the author recalls the capital distinction established by Henry James[2] between saying and showing. [3] No one has done it better than Lars Iyer in his eccentric, masterful narrative Espurious.

It is a comic novel – or, if you prefer, satirical – inscribed in the great tradition of Thomas Bernhard, the last Céline (From One Castle to Another, North, Rigodon) and, above all, Samuel Beckett:[4] that is, not the superficial humour of a certain English narrative[5] but the joyless, corrosive, nihilistic and absolutely desperate laughter that informs almost all the texts of those illustrious misanthropes. Indeed, Iyer's book is dominated by two of the most original, pessimistic and hilarious characters in contemporary European literature: at one extreme is W, a tormented university professor obsessed with Kafka, the Jewish messianic tradition,[6] failure, Kierkegaard and the cinema of Béla Tarr; in the other is Lars:[7] narrator of the novel, Hindu, aspiring philosopher, chronically unemployed, fat, affable, and author of a book that his friend incessantly criticizes: both poor, alcoholics, scholars, anguished, and eccentric: two intellectuals entrenched in their dark, damp, barely habitable apartments[8] in the north of England with a single thought that they have developed to their last, Unbreathable conclusions: Europe – and perhaps the whole of so-called Western civilization – is about to sink into the deepest of abysses: they have no idea what exactly that means and they recognize it, but, of course, a small detail like that is not going to prevent them from speculating endlessly on the matter. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that almost the entire novel is composed exclusively of the dense, hilarious dialogues between the two great failures… with special emphasis on Jewish messianism[9], the life of Kafka and the incessant derision that W – incomparable master of the art of insulting – deploys against his best (read: only) friend: "When did you know that you would not amount to anything Lars?; When did you realize that you would never be more than an idiot, an ape that pretends to think?… And at first you seemed so smart, but then we read your work: how can anyone be so stupid? Kafka was incapable of writing a sentence that was not perfect. Wittgenstein suffered for thought. But you, Lars, you are the anti-Kafka, the anti-Wittgenstein, the greatest philosophical fraud in English history, a fat stutterer who annihilates thought!, says W: my obesity impresses him, so does my gluttony… but above all my stupidity." [10]

Well, I suspect that was not what Cicero[11] had in mind when he composed his On Friendship: What's Going On Here? Is W a sadist who torments his friend for entertainment? Not at all, for he admires many of Lars's traits and reserves his greatest contempt for himself:[12] he is a quintessential misfortune (in the sense Bernhard gave to the term) and, without the slightest doubt, Kafka was his Glenn Gould. [13] It is clear that, along with Jewish messianism, the other great theme is stupidity…, but not the kind that can be found anywhere, but a very special variety: the Bétisse[14] that obsessed Flaubert in his correspondence to the paradoxical extreme of acquiring an unexpected metaphysical dimension: in this sense, it would not be inaccurate to consider Espurious (among other things) as a rewriting of Bouvard and Pécuchet for the twenty-first century: in the Frenchman's text, two championship imbeciles who do not know they are so, aspire to master all existing knowledge and, overwhelmed by the vastness of the enterprise, end up – what a surprise! – reduced to copyists of all the printed material they can find; [15] In Iyer's novel, by contrast, W and Lars have the keenest imaginable awareness of their limits and incessantly proclaim: "Our idiocy possesses a very uncommon purity, on that we agree. We are idiots, so idiotic that we cannot even conceive the depth of our stupidity. We are mystics of idiocy, there is something cosmic and almost majestic in our ignorance." Now, it is precisely at this point that the strange link between the two great themes of the novel is articulated:[16]: stupidity and Jewish messianism: in fact, for the protagonists it is not enough to recognize their own idiocy but also that of the whole of the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and even the Universe itself[17] (why should they limit themselves, after all, to the third planet in the solar system?).
And, as so often happens when one wants to see a meaning against all evidence, theology emerges triumphantly to justify the unbridled tenor of his thought: "And you still ask why I read Rosenzweig: the guy understood everything, Lars… look at those nauseating Germans gorging themselves on beer and sausages!, look at the apes passing for academics in England!, Look in a mirror, Lars!: the world has been molded in your image and likeness: England and Europe, Europe and England: fat idiots choking on beer and sausages, publishing nonsense they call philosophy You yourself are a sign of the end times, Lars!: the Messiah is coming, only he can save us. But you're an atheist, W, I tell him. That does not invalidate my thinking!, exclaims W. It does not matter what I believe or do not believe: moreover, that I do not believe in God can be a magnificent argument in favor of his existence." A remarkable phrase that recalls the abyssal paradoxes of Flannery O'Connor[18] and marks the beginning of the most delirious monologues pronounced by W, supreme and virtuous garrulore of failure: until that moment his interests were relatively broad (that is to say); now his obsession with eschatological signs and the arrival of the Messiah proliferates and reaches a manic intensity that is very reminiscent of the absolute prose of László Krasznahorkai: W gets drunk in Germany, predicts the arrival of the Messiah "when no one needs him anymore" and vomits copiously while continuing to utter insults against all the German philosophers who have ever existed, exist and will exist; W reads dozens of books in German about God and advanced mathematics without understanding ninety percent of what he scrutinizes (his German is poor, his mathematical knowledge non-existent) and proclaims, despite everything, that he has made great discoveries; W mocks Lars for the umpteenth time and suspects that perhaps his friend is responsible for the Messiah's delay. [19] It is useless to continue this enumeration: the essential thing is how, through the meticulous deployment of certain procedures,[20] Jewish theology becomes absolutely derisory in this extraordinary story, perhaps the best imaginable continuation of the grandiose comic-philosophical program initiated by the Austrian atrabiliary who wrote Old Masters.
[1] Just one of the many surprising observations that flood his splendid correspondence with Scholem.

[2] "The great master of research on the formal possibilities of narrative fiction" (Frank Kermode).

[3] Which refers, of course, to the use of narrative procedures and has nothing to do with certain considerations of Wittgenstein in the final pages of the Tractatus.

[4] Plays, of course, but also stories such as Watt or Mercier and Camier.

[5] The much-celebrated—and vastly overrated—wit of Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, the insufferable, abysmally banal P. G. Woodhouse, and so many others.

[6] In particular the highly influential, almost mythical, theological-philosophical treatise The Star of Redemption, written by the ill-fated – he died at the age of 43 – elusive and fascinating Franz Rosenzweig: a kind of Jewish Max Stirner who deeply impressed Gershom Scholem.

[7] Yes, it's named after the author of the novel, but that doesn't mean anything: at most it's just another instance of the so-called British self-deprecating humour: the guy makes fun of himself.

[8] Lars' is infested with rats and is not without leaks.

[9] W hardly thinks about anything else and tries – with predictable results – to learn advanced mathematics to determine when the Messiah will arrive: "It has nothing to do with mysticism!

[10] These are merely some of the more "charitable insults" devised by W.

[11] Otherwise, W does not take the Roman philosophers seriously: "All impostors, imitators without talent, Lars: You must read the Greeks! Read them in the original!, says W. But you don't really know classical Greek, I reply. It's not true!, W exalts: I can read Plato with a good dictionary!"

[12] When you read what he thinks about his own stupidity and lack of talent, everything said about Lars seems almost harmless: in the difficult art of self-destruction (verbal, although physically he doesn't fare much better) W has reached real heights.

[13] "Kafka ruined me, Lars: when I was young and still thought I would become something I was unlucky enough to read The Castle: how can someone write like that? For a long time I wanted to be Kafka, but now I understand that I have only become Max Brod."

[14] An essentially untranslatable French term: in one of his letters the great novelist goes so far as to maintain that "masterpieces are stupid; they have a calm aspect, like the very productions of nature, like large animals and mountains": words whose meaning eludes me but which certainly confer on the concept – at least in Flaubert's poetics – a complexity far superior to translations such as "idiocy" or "imbecility".

[15] "What shall we do with all this? There's nothing to think about! Let's copy!"

[16] That W claims to have discovered: "That's the key to everything, Lars… and only a failure like me could understand it!: it is the only original thought I have ever had in my life".

[17] Only a few writers, philosophers and artists escape: Kafka –naturally–, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Blanchot, Lévinas, Béla Tarr.

[18] I am thinking, first of all, of the great story The Lame Shall Enter First.

[19] "Your stupidity prevents his coming… You are the antimesias, Lars, a fat stupid and drunkard, a proud failure!"

[20] Obsessive repetition of phrases, witty insults, endless invectives and, above all, the grotesque splendor of the monologue delivered by an idiot, "full of sound and fury, which means nothing".