It is never early enough for W. (who believes things started going downhill in the mid-Neolithic); but neither is it ever late enough. Just as the end keeps on ending endlessly, the novel itself keeps on beginning inexorably. In the paradoxical incipit of Grammars of Creation, George Steiner declares that "We have no more beginnings": here, we have nothing but beginnings, but it comes to the same thing really.
from another interesting review: Andrew Gallix on Dogma for Bookslut.
Spurious nominated for The Believer Book Award.
Iyer implies that a better or “older” world, where literature could still exist, would be one where his own writing couldn’t. The presumption here is that Spurious and its sequel are “signs of the times,” and thus that books can still sum up the epoch in which they’re written: surely a “literary” aim, if ever there was one. Perhaps Iyer’s is a literary project par excellence. Presenting his novels as symptoms or symbols, he slightly uncritically slips into sync with one of W.’s dictums in Dogma: “always write as though your ideas were world-historical.”
from the great David Winters' review of Dogma for The Rumpus.
Jacob Silverman reviews Dogma at the Quarterly Conversation.
The irony is that the reality of W.'s and Lars' despair is palliated as it is affirmed and actualised. Writing alone opens a space in which a cure becomes possible, but only if despair is acknowledged. Dogma saturates despair with despair with disingenuous charm; a sly disavowal of despair.
The great Steve Mitchelmore reviews Dogma.
New radio interview with Ian Williams, of the Catskills Review of Books. It's the March 3rd one. I'm more than usually incoherent in it.
Kevin Breathnach reviews Dogma for Totally Dublin.
Spurious and Dogma reviewed by Jason Pettus at the Chicago Centre for Literature and Photography.
Short review of Dogma at Barnes & Noble.
Naben Ruthnum responds to Spurious and to an interview of mine.
Caleb Wilson reviews Dogma at Good Reads.
TChris reviews Dogma at Tzer Island.
Heartwood reviews Spurious at A Reading Life.
Interviewed on Vile Jelly radio.
TChris reviews Dogma at Amazon.com.
Sam Jordison writes up my reading at The Wapping Project for The Guardian (not online; 25th Feb):
“I confess here tonight, before the company, there must be something very wrong with me. I want to parade my inadequacies before an audience. There’s something very wrong with me.”
So said Lars Iyer to the crowd shivering before him in the beautiful – but very cold – gallery space in East London’s Wapping Project, where he was launching his (excellent) new novel Dogma. He went on:
“What kind of person even confesses like this? A masochist! And not even the interesting kind who likes being whipped. A particularly boring kind of masochist, with feeble, pathetic little auto-critiques.”
Such self-recrimination will be familiar to readers of Lars Iyer’s novels. In them the narrator (also called Lars, and just like the author, an academic phliosopher based at Newcastle University) is forever musing over his own short comings. And when he isn’t doing so, his friend, named W., does it for him, comparing him, among other things to a “sad ape locked up with his faeces”, and “a harbinger”, a sign of “the End”.
There has been much speculation about whether this acerbic character is based on a flesh and blood person and now Iyer provided a definitive answer. W. is indeed real. In fact, he even wanted to come and witness the launch of Dogma, but was too busy.
Yet even if W. couldn’t make an appearance, he remains a constant influence in Iyer’s life. Only this week, the author told us, W. tried to carry out an “intervention” and force him to apply himself to his academic work more rigorously. “He wanted me to mend my ways,” he explained. “He said, ‘you are a disgrace to philosophy. The way you parade yourself on facebook is disgusting.’”
It’s to be hoped that W. doesn’t also read Iyer’s twitter stream, for there, the author admitted: “I’ve put up five tweets today advertising this event. My God. It’s come to this. I have no soul. I’m my own marketeer.” He blamed Thatcher and neo-liberalism for this urge to hawk his own ego, but most of all, he blamed himself: “I disgust myself and the problem is that I enjoy disgusting myself.”
Levi Stahl of I've Been Writing Lately has a few things to say about Dogma.
Out now: Sinead Murphy's The Art Kettle. Want a review copy? Email me.
Lars is a first-person narrator who almost never gets to speak for himself — he is primarily occupied with reporting W.’s alternating self-loathing and Lars-loathing, in a strange mix of free indirect discourse and direct quotation. The result is a strangely co-narrated novel, one that seems to grow directly out of the dysfunctional dynamic of the friendship, which — perhaps like the damp — takes on a life of its own beyond the control of either partner. Unexpectedly, however, the result of this claustrophobic framing is that the despair is always leavened by a certain hope or even sincerity.
Adam Kosko very interestingly reviews Dogma at An Und Fur Sich.
Drew Nellins reviews Dogma for The Millions.
Dogma reviewed by Lakis Fourouklas, at his blog, Fiction & More.
Richard muses on Dogma at The Existence Machine.
Continuing to blog the new novel, Wittgenstein Jr.
Review from Library Journal, February 15, 2012
This sequel to Iyer's Spurious brings back W. and Lars, perhaps the most unlikely and absurd literary duo since Samuel Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon. This is a loosely constructed philosophical comedy with an episodic feel. (Spurious began as a series of blog posts, and this novel feels similar.) While there is a minimal plot (W. and Lars take a trip to America; they start an intellectual/performance art movement they call Dogma; W. worries about losing his professorship in departmental cutbacks), there's little in the way of change or character development. But that's really not the point. Rather, this book is about the crazily dysfunctional friendship of the main characters (one of whom may be a projection of the other's imagination), filled with cuttingly witty insults, and W.'s acid take on nearly everything.
VERDICT Like Godot, this novel is a philosophical rumination, at once serious and playful, on the nature of existence and meaning. While it's comic, there is at bottom a profoundly tragic sense of the chaos and emptiness of modern life. Despair has rarely been so entertaining.
Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA
Publisher's Weekly reviews Dogma.
Dogma reviewed at Booktrust.
Short essay, Top 10 Literary Frenemies, in the Guardian.
'The United Kingdom has a Thomas Bernhard, and his name is Lars Iyer'.
Dogma reviewed at Hey Small Press.
My piece Top 10 literary frenemies in The Guardian
Russell: I told him he not simply to state what he thinks true, but to give arguments for it, but he said arguments spoil its beauty, and that he would feel as if was dirtying a flower with muddy hands. He does appear to me – the artist in intellect is so very rare. I told him I hadn’t the heart to say anything against that, and that he had better acquire a slave to state the arguments. I am seriously afraid that no one will see the point of anything he writes, because he won’t recommend it by arguments addressed to a different point of view.
Russell on Wittgenstein, in a letter
Tiny Camels on Dogma.
Lars Iyer's Blog 