Author: Lars Iyer

When word reached Sun Ra of John Coltrane's death, he was distraught. Even though they had only met a few times Sun Ra felt that Coltrane was truly remarkable, both as a man and a musician, and that he even had messianic qualities. At some moments he seemed to take the responsibility for his death on himself – claimed that he should have given him more warnings, or that the secret knowledge that he had told him was too much for him to handle; but at other times he said that Coltrane had been warned, that if he had joined the Arkestra it would never have happened, and it was his own fault. The Arkestra played at a memorial for Coltrane at the University of Pennsylvania shortly after his death, and for years afterwards Sun Ra would suddenly bring up Coltrane's passing in conversation as an object lesson – whether to himself or to others was not always clear.

from John F. Szwed's Space is the Place

Philosophical Humour

This novel explores an inter-relationship between two characters who live in a disillusioned time at the end of history. However, despite showing the influence of Kafka and Beckett the use of humour in the work undercuts the apparent despair often conveyed by the characters and in the process suggests something redemptive is available. The work is intended as the first part of a trilogy of pieces and its register will only be fully clear when all three parts of the work are complete but just alone it indicates something serious precisely in its frivolity and indicates a philosophical future for novelistic humour. Whilst much of the discussion appears initially a "heavy burden" the overall effect of the novel is childlike in the best sense and promises a kind of transfiguration of the reader. It decidedly deserves wide exposure as it is a book which has the potential to make philosophy generally accessible, not least through showing its presence within the key literary works of modernism. It is also, throughout, screamingly funny. Its worth a read both for the ideas and for the laughs. Read it: you won't regret it!

Kantian 3, Not the Booker review

How about the following as an ingredient list for a comic novel?

1) An philosophical analysis of subjectivity as intersubjectivity (relation to Other)

2) A buddy tale

3) A compendium of aggressively-nasty-as-funny comedic shtick

Not a likely juxtaposition, perhaps; but then the successful close association of contrasts is the essence of many a tasty recipe. Lars Iyer has achieved just such an inventive and rewarding blend in his novel “Spurious,” which gives us the fraught friendship of two self-described “victims” of literature. The notion of a conjunction of contrasts characterizes the reader’s response as well; in this case it's laughing and thinking, simultaneously, an effect often sought but seldom as successfully realized as in "Spurious". As we read and laugh we sometimes feel as though we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We are thereby subtly drawn into the web woven by the much-put-upon narrator, who reveals himself, not directly, but through the relentless mediation of his descriptions of his friend “W.” The neologism “frenemies” might well have been invented to describe their relation to each other, but with a decided emphasis on the first syllable. We listen in and laugh as the two friends discover each other through the Other, sharing the miseries of frustrated hopes and encroaching horizons.

I'll conclude with own small exotic ingredient, a pinch of Musical Comedy lore. Reading “Spurious” we happily learn anew the truth Vera Charles confirms for Auntie Mame (talk about comedic shtick!) , “Who else but a bosom buddy will tell you the whole stinking truth?” 

Steve Pantani, Not the Booker review

Since I am W. and this book has for some unknown and bizarre reason actually reached the final stages of this superb tournament (if I might use a sport metaphor, which reminds me of the time that I took Lars to a football game and he referred to the crowd as the 'audience'), I might, for the first time and in public so to speak, say something about it. First of all, it is all true if slightly exaggerated. We really do live and talk like that. Secondly, Lars is funnier than we are, if that makes any sense. Thirdly, even I laugh when I read it, and I was there. Finally, I do actually think it is beautifully written. And this is my last word. The only response to the times we live in is a kind of desperate humour which I think Spurious has bucket loads of.

William Large, Not the Booker review

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, Not the Booker review

How fitting that a book called Spurious, that started life as a blog, should be a frontrunner for the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize. This not being the Booker, Spurious is neither a state-of-the-age doorstopper, a fictional resurrection of a misunderstood historical personage, nor a parochial lament warbled from the banks of the Liffey. It is instead a series of blogpost-sized snippets following the repetitive interactions of a tragi-comic double-act – the down-at-heel narrator Lars, and his hilariously harsh friend W.

Lars and W. are relatively undistinguished philosophy tutors at English universities, and both are united by a feeling of utter inadequacy, irrelevance, stupidity and, well, spuriousness in the face of their intellectual heroes. They meet, talk, drink, despair and console, but mostly W. just mercilessly – and hilariously – abuses Lars. In one particularly funny passage, W. compares their friendship with that of Blanchot and Levinas – except whereas the French philosophers exchanged correspondence of depth, significance and high seriousness, W. and Lars draw each other pictures of cocks on the internet. Their problem, W. notes, is that neither of them is a Kafka – they are both Brods.

Lord Adonis, Not the Booker review

Spurious is an un-English book in several ways – partly because of its complete lack of interest in the mode of mainstream, lyrical realist fiction that is so dominant in this country, but also due to its subject matter and tone. W. and Lars’s heroes stem from the tradition of continental modernism – from Kafka, Heidegger, Blanchot and Beckett to Bela Tarr – and they are infused with a very European anxiety. The book also owes a great deal to Thomas Bernhard, who is unmentioned but whose presence is unmistakable throughout.

Following the distancing technique employed by Bernhard in novels such as The Loser and Old Masters, the entire narrative is reported to us by a narrator (Lars), who is the passive figure in most of the interactions. Thus the book consists for the most part of the thoughts and opinions of W., though the only narrative access we have to him is second hand. This introduces an aspect of what James Wood calls ‘double unreliability’ – we know that W. has been rewritten by Lars, but we don’t know to what extent. As in Bernhard, the characters’ voices are subsumed in the act of narration, reinforcing the insurmountable distance between art and life, and the impossibility of writing.

Indeed it is this sense of distance and impossibility that is perhaps the central current running through Spurious. Lars and W. are anachronistic figures chasing a seriousness and authenticity of intellectual experience that seems to be no longer attainable. Even their despair is ironic, clichéd and absurd – the very possibility of authentic thought seems to have withered and died, crowded out by the intellectual giants in relation to whom their failure is assured. As with Bernhard and Beckett, Spurious is pulled along by gallows humour, but the bleakness and despair underpinning it is real too.

Spurious will probably remain a cult book that appeals primarily to those with the sort of intellectual interests that lead them to empathise with Lars and W. That said, for all its acknowledged spuriousness and self-mockery, it is a book that responds to serious questions in a way that is honest, thoughtful and deceptively profound. It is, in the best possible sense, the opposite of the sort of book that normally wins the Booker Prize. That it seems likely to walk off with that award’s tongue-in-cheek inversion is therefore entirely appropriate. 

Grinding Repetition, an Idiot Punching Bag

I had good reason to pre-order my copy of this particular book as it was written by Lars Iyer, my philosophy lecturer when I studied in Newcastle ten years ago or so.

I used to read his varied and dense blog of the same name while at university and I was particularly drawn to the passages about the person he would simply refer to as W., his friend and apparent tormenter.

I often wondered why abbreviate the name to W.? Everyone knew who it was. He would gladly tell his philosophy groups stories about his friend and use his full name, which also begins with W. Was it just a hint towards anonymity? Did it preserve anything? Was it due to Lars’ obsession with Kafka, and a stylistic nod to the character, K.?

The novel. Within the first few pages, I had a feeling that I had read some parts before – of course I had on the blog itself. Pretty soon it ceased to matter. There is grinding repetition. It often has you think you have turned the page only to reread the same page again. Not unlike the feeling of reading Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller, where the protagonist keeps returning his faulty books to the bookshop only to discover the whole book never really existed.

So what is Spurious about? It is a hedonistic journey into the apocalypse with W. and his idiot punching bag, Lars. The novel is a series of numberless chapters, mostly quite short. Something I quickly noticed is that Lars seems almost anonymous to the reader. Like the character of I in Withnail and I, he is for a large portion of the book nameless and exists only as mirror to W. W.’s speech is the only speech that is reported. Lars never gives us an opinion directly – every thought or attempt at thought is refracted through the hilariously hateful sneer of W.

I had the pleasure of meeting the real W. once or twice in Newcastle. I particularly remember sitting out on the sunny terraces of The Cumberland Arms and watching the two of them go into a hilarious double act of improvised verbal depravity. They would riff scatologically, each trying to out-gross the other, while draining pints of real ale. It wasn’t clear whether this was an act for our benefit, or whether we had somehow caught them backstage, or in private. Either way it was hysterical and I remember eventually leaving them and wondering down the steps to Ouseburn valley in a hazy stupor, inventively swearing to myself like some kind of unwashed Malcolm Tucker.

W.’s accusations in the novel are contradictory and often harsh. Much like the rough banter of friendship many men will recognise, only it is dressed up in a pretentious philosophical babble. W.’s main concern is that they are both philosophers, both studying and lecturing on the subject of thought and yet neither one of them has had a single thought worth mentioning. Not one original thought. They are always on the verge of thought, it seems, but how would they know if they even know if they had an original thought? Instead they drink endlessly and shamefully, dousing themselves in their own unfulfilled dreams (whatever they were) and increasingly bleak future.

Kafka is endlessly referred to as the ultimate hero. Are either of them Kafka or are they both Max Brod, the friend of Kakfa who refused written instructions to burn all of his works after he died? How is it possible to be friends with someone with such literary power? It is ok for Lars and W. because they are both Max Brod. They are both the jealous friend, the idiot incapable of pure thought.

Where the blog form can be overwhelming, endlessly scrolling down white pages to no fixed conclusion, the novel lends itself well to this repetitive style. While essentially we are none the wiser at the end of the book, we have been given a deep insight into the bizarrely intense friendship Lars obviously has with W. There is a wonderful recurring motif of Lars’ moulding and dampening house. It evolves into a character itself and Lars develops an ambivalent relationship as the moisture grows from a wet stain to a freely flowing river inside his house – a beautifully disturbing image. Perhaps a grand metaphor for modern living and indeed modern dying.

Do read it, it’s a treat.

Dan Collective, Not the Booker review

A Diogenes Barrel

At the company where I used to work, I tell W., they named their meeting rooms after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant, or Wittgenstein. – 'Did they have a Diogenes room?', W. asks. 'A Diogenes barrel?'

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I tell him. The Octavo Notebooks. Bits from the diaries and letters. I'd keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I tell him. I was like a fairytale giant, burying his heart in a treasure chest at the bottom of a lake.

In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, I tell W. Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me as I looked out towards the massive hotel at the roundabout, built in the style of a Swiss mountain chalet?

I wandered all day through the company corridors. I drifted from coffee machine to coffee machine. I stared off through the windows. I sat on the leather sofas in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime. And what did I see? What did I know?

The Opposite of the Gods

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation, he says, as we head out for our walk. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is inappropriate at any time, W. says. It’s a ruse. An excuse. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

'This wood, for example. That field. And that – what is that?' A barrow, I tell him. An ancient burial mound. But W. says that it's only a refuse heap. A pile of rubbish abandoned among the trees.

He can imagine me as a boy, W. says, cycling out through the new housing estates, and through what remained of the woodland – muddy tracks along field-edges, fenced-in bridleways and overgrown footpaths. – 'You were looking for something', he says. 'You knew something was missing'.

He sees it in his mind's eye: I'm carrying my bike over the railway bridge. I'm cycling through glades of tree stumps in the forestry plantations. I'm following private roads past posh schools and riding academies. I'm looking for barrows and ley lines, W. says. I'm looking for Celtic gods and gods of any kind.

And what do I find as I wheel my bike across the golf course? What, in the carpark of an out of town retail park? What, on the bench outside the supermarket, eating my discounted sandwiches? The everyday, W. says, which is to say, the opposite of gods.

These Are the Days

A visit to my hometown. To my home suburbs, W. says. He wants to know where it all went wrong. – 'You started well enough, didn't you? You had advantages in life. You weren’t starving. You weren’t brought up in a war zone …' When did it go wrong?, W. asks. Where did it go wrong?

He sees it immediately. Houses jammed together. Cars packing the driveways. There’s no expanse!, W. says. There are no vistas! Every single bit of land is accounted for. Everything is owned, used, put to work …

This is the way the world will end: as a gigantic suburb, that’s what W. used to think, he says. But now he knows the world will end in the skies above the suburbs. That’s where they’ll ride, the four horsemen of our apocalypse.

These are the days, W. says. This is the reckoning. Of what though? He's unsure. There must be some kind of accounting, he knows that. Someone must be keeping score, but who?

Sometimes, W. thinks I’m glad I live in the End Times. Isn’t the coming apocalypse the perfect correlate of my desire for ruination? Isn’t the destruction of the world only the macrocosmic version of my self-destruction? What would I be without the End? A man whose madness signified nothing, spoke of nothing. A symptom without a disease …

It’s different with him, of course. He was made for the beginning of the world, not the end of it. He is a man of hope, W. says. Of the youth of the world. Ah, but that’s not true, not really, he grants. He is a man of the end who yearns for the beginning, yearns for innocence, as I do not. He looks back, into the vanished glory of the past, and I look forward, into the storm clouds of catastrophe.

Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod?" W. asks his friend Lars while Spurious takes its course. He decides they are both the latter, buffoonish adjuncts to a writer whose work is so authentic and truthful that he would rather his friend burn the lot than expose it to universal misunderstanding. But he didn't burn anything, and the fact that Spurious exists for us to savour is due to both Lars' and W.'s quality of Brodness. W. is right: they too have listened to Kafka and ignored him. Moreover, Kafka did not write blurbs for his friend's regrettable novels, so the unreliable reviewer who wrote on the back of Spurious that it is not only a comedy but "a profound philosophical rhapsody playing out the culmination of the religious narratives of East and West" is not Kafka either. So where can he be found?

If Kafka were alive today he would not care to write novels, particularly if the pinnacle of literary achievement is the prettification afforded by a garland or, worse, popularity. Writing to a friend, he said that we should read only books that wound and stab us or that make us feel banished into forests far from everyone. He went on to write a few. Today these would be the last to win a prize. This is where Kafka can be found: with matches at the ready. It is the great virtue of Spurious that it seeks the flames Kafka desires while, at the same time, due to its Brodness, it revels in soggy kindling. Such ambition and hopelessness combined is liberating.

SteveofThisSpace, Not the Booker review

Funambulism

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.

RourkeLee, Not the Booker review

Forever Spurious, Never False

Spurious is a seriously funny book. It makes us feel the pain of failure, absurdity, moral weakness, and damp kitchens. But it also invites us to enjoy this pain, to share it with others, and to wash it down with the best gin in the world. The relationship between the narrator and W. is painfully real. Will W.’s scathing and relentless criticism of the narrator never cease? Will the narrator never fight back? But here, too, in the misadventures, failed encounters and bad manners of our heroes, there is enjoyment and love. There is also something more: genuine philosophical insight. In its own irreverent way, Spurious engages – with its own kind of reverence – with some of the most important thinkers and issues of our time. Emerging from the damp of a gloomy flat, infected with the flat melancholy of late modernity, are brilliant reflections on Kafka, Rosenzweig, Spinoza, Levinas, Blanchot and others. Spurious is the best kind of philosophical novel: a comedy that invites us to engage in the seriousness of thought without taking ourselves too seriously.

Sazerac, Not the Booker review

This is not the Booker Prize. Let’s remember that. This is something quite different. The idea of an award named Not the Booker Prize is cheeky: it playfully challenges the prestigious honour of the Booker with a counterfeit alternative, an imitation of the real thing. Or is that going to far? I would suggest that the Not the Booker Prize is not so phoney after all: it simply awards on the basis of different values. Here, we are not looking for books that fit snugly on canonical shelves. Not the Booker Prize is our chance to praise new and alternative voices, writers that colour outside the lines.

With this in mind, what could be a more appropriate winner than Lars Iyer’s Spurious? The clue is in the title, surely. Beautifully awkward and wilfully absurd, Spurious is a short, funny text that celebrates the lowdown and the everyday. If we are feeling generous, we might compare its two protagonists with any number of other haplessly comic duos: Withnail and I immediately springs to mind, or Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, or Samuel Beckett’s Mercier and Camier. But we’re already getting off the point – already lunging towards the classics and forgetting what draws us towards Iyer’s book in the first place. If we want texts of high-standing and lofty repute, we already know where to go. But the exchanges that comprise Spurious are something of an antidote, deflating egos and popping grandiose ideas. It’s a book that is, paradoxically, both below and above literary prizes and trinkets. What better candidate, then, for such a mischievous award?

Rhys Tranter, Not the Booker review

“We’re essentially joyful. That’s what will save us”

"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."

If that doesn't make you laugh then perhaps Spurious isn't for you. Or maybe it only made me laugh because I was by then attuned to the book's brilliant style, where the old friends comedy and tragedy don't so much rub shoulders and share bodily fluids. If you're reading this at all other than to check the voter count for the Not the Booker Prize, then I urge you to stop reading and read Spurious instead.

“‘Go on, tell me,’ says W., getting excited. ‘How fat are you now?’”

John Self, Not the Booker review

An English Campus Novel Written By Kafka

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, Not the Booker review

Philosophy as Comedy

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, Not the Booker review

If you’ve followed Lars’ Spurious blog, this book is a treat and a surprise — while many of the themes and passages seem familiar, you don’t get the sense of a blog having been chopped up and made into a book. It truly stands alone, and it is a wonderful thing to hold in your hands, open, and feel the texture of the pages. carry it around with you, mark pages with scraps of paper, pencil little stars in the margins. Too much of what’s published nowadays might as well be in blog form: easily digested, skimmed over, forgettable.

While much of the book is taken up with the near-constant verbal sparring of Lars and W., and though many reviewers make a great deal of the humour here (and it IS a very funny book), this seems to do the work some disservice, as if to say “yes, it’s kind of brainy and deals with ideas and philosophy and it raises some real questions about friendship, the place of writing, thinking, etc. in today’s world — but no, it’s FUNNY.” No need for apologies or using its capacity to amuse an excuse. Humour, in Spurious, acts as leavening — it lightens the book, but also gives it complexity and deeper form.

It’s a rather quick and breezy read. It also is worth spending some time savouring. A general rule of thumb for any book or film for me is “would I see it again?” (And/or “would I recommend it?”) In the case of Spurious a) yes, I have reread it, and b) I’m recommending it to you now. Easily one of the best books of the past couple of years, and definitely an object that will become more dog-eared with time and re-reading; other books will come and leave my shelves, but Spurious is a keeper.

Marzek, Not the Booker review

Not Spurious At All

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, Not the Booker review

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.

ReadySteadyMark, Not the Booker review

The Sport of Self

Opening the pages of Spurious one finds oneself eavesdropping on two rather self-obsessed characters, obsessed in fact to the point of acknowledging their own self-obsession and mocking it; quite cruelly mocking their own pretensions not only about literature, philosophy and the world at large, not only about each other's own pretensions and profuse failings, but most importantly and above all that most abhorrent of pretensions, that most abysmal of failings: holding to the very notion of a self. As the pages fly by–after all, for all its gravitas and references to"big ideas" (only to shoot them down) reading Spurious is humorous breeze–one starts to suspect that this is not a dialogue between an overly-serious protagonist and his curmudgeonly companion, but rather the groans and rattling of the very infrastructure propping up the Cartesian ego, emitted by the strains of bearing its own load together with the ever-burgeoning substructures required by the weaknesses arising from its own existence and the absurd effort to prevent or at least prolong its inevitable collapse. Spurious indeed, and if ever a work of literature was worthy of an anti-prize then surely none could be more deserving.

Pensum, Not the Booker review

Sehrsucht

Let me agree with the other viewers, there's no question this is a very funny book. Spurious can actually make you laugh. I don't say that lightly. Only two other books in my life have made me laugh out loud in the way Spurious did, Confederacy of Dunces and Catch 22. Even so,, Spurious should not be filed as a mere comedy. There something quite serious to this novel. For me, it was the awakening of a sense of yearning and urgency. Yearning for what? I'm not sure, and maybe I am too stupid to articulate what this novel-machine does. Spurious sparks an "intense longing for that unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves. . .

Digital Alice, Not the Booker review

Spurious – the last laugh of a dying thought

Lars Iyer’s Spurious is probably the most profound contribution to post modern literature that these islands have produced since Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Acerbically witty, reveling in the banality of the daily disintegration of thought in Britain, it manages to transgress our everyday delineations of truth, reality, fiction and authenticity with a wanton hilarity which is breathtaking in its audacity. Spurious is based on the true story of a friendship surviving on the dregs of metaphysics – two professional philosophers clinging onto a discipline that has been systematically undermined in Britain since the eighties, the callousness of their relationship reflecting the dire nature of not only their personal positions, but the fate of thought itself. W’s much harked upon great Essex University Philosophy postgraduate scene was real, but it did not herald the renaissance we thought was coming, but rather the last wet flop of the dying fish called Continental Philosophy. It is worth noting that the most consummate of thinkers from that group left Britain immediately and became a successful cars salesman in France, whereas the worst became well known. To my knowledge, W is both charmed and incensed at the book – it is a typical Larsian product, brilliant in its ignorance, but condemning W to a life on the sidelines, immortalized not in the thought he loves, but in the pork scratching of a beleaguered friend. Lars has shown himself to be a true artist, risking probably his only true friendship for the sake of his work and I hope he will be adequately rewarded for his courage.

Coffee Percolator, Not the Booker review

Spurious may well be the only way left to write about the end times. Who better to truly accept the coming of the apocalypse than those who are acutely aware of their own stupidity and who are dumbfounded by their ultimate inability to even attempt thought? Endowed with a quasi-religious lucidity and insight into the wonders of their own – very poor – limitation, W. and Lars are left with no choice but to make pathetic attempt after pathetic attempt at some semblance of spirituality through drink and a strongly-held belief in conversation, which inevitably always spirals into an inane species of self-deprecation so full of resigned joy that it doesn't even have the power to be redemptive.

These men are true idiots of a very dangerous kind, and they deserve to have their idiocy exposed to the world, if only so that it may serve as a warning to the rest of us.

Yaron Golan, Not the Booker review