Category: Uncategorized

Laurel and Hardy and Kafka and Blanchot

This is a novel that is deeply in love with philosophy, but acutely conscious of the inanities of human thinking and the bottomless pit of the aphorism. Iyer's protagonists – provincial academic philosophers who aspire to Nietzschean heights – are exemplars of Pessoa's definition of decadence: "total loss of unconsciousness". Relentlessly self-aware, they differ from each other only in the strategies they have adopted to cope with their perceived failures. 'Lars' anaesthetises himself with food, alcohol, and 'chav mags': W., his inseparable friend and foil, swinging between rage and despair, jabs and dodges and consoles himself with the thought that however inadequate he may be, his friend offers a horrible example of the further depths to which it is still possible to sink.

Meanwhile, in Lars's flat, the damp extends its empire, as though the whole world were beginning its return to a primal condition of wateriness. The disaster has already taken place…

In 'Spurious' Lars Iyer has managed a difficult trick: he has written a book that is intelligent and unconventional in form but eminently readable, serious yet funny, and not a sentence too long. Laurel and Hardy butt heads with Levinas and Blanchot, Kafka and Rosenzweig in a way that should seem arch but gives birth to a strange poignancy. I highly recommend the experience.

Paul Bowles, Not the Booker review

"What we lack in intellectual ability and real knowledge, we make up for in pathos, W. says."

As someone who has devoted an inordinate amount of my life worrying about literature and philosophy and aesthetics, but who often suspects that I've learned next to nothing for all those hours spent reading, and who knows for a fact that I'm certainly less wealthy for all those hours, and who often wonders, as W. wonders, if I'll every have a halfway decent thought in my entire life, Spurious was an epiphany for me. Because the novel makes it painfully, poignantly clear that a passion for thought, for philosophy, and for literature is a foolish pursuit, a laughable pursuit, but that, for people of a certain temperament, it is also an unavoidable pursuit. Lars and W. have no choice. They will bicker and stumble and read and theorize until the day they die. But they will not be judged, in the end, by success or by failure. They need not be Kafkas, or leaders, or thinkers. They will be judged by the pathos of their character. By their idiotic joys, their nightlong revels, their endless friendship.

For me, this thin, devilish book reframed the rules of my days, and erased a longterm source of doubt and sometimes shame. Because I see now that intellectual pursuits need not have purpose nor consequence. It is not a practical endeavor. It is merely a way of living. A foolish way of living, or perhaps I should say, another foolish way of living. But there's charm and pleasure to be had along the way. And this small revelation has been quite a relief to me. For which I'm grateful.

"How can we breathe?" Lars and W. ask. "But an encounter with a real thinker is precisely that breath."

That's how I felt upon finishing Spurious: that I had been given a much needed breath of air after years and years of suffocating pages.

HenryL, Not the Booker review

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

Spurious is many things: an attempt to place philosophy into (almost) everyday conversation; an account of a classic existential double act (think Laurel and Hardy, Vladimir and Estragon, Withnail and I, or the psychogeographers of the "Robinson" films); a tale of menace and despair; and an opportunity to see how the narrative logic of the blog can be fitted (or not) to the more traditional framework of the book. Which of these (or other) aspects we wish to dwell on will lead to multiple different readings, different reasons to like or dislike the novel. Personally, I like to read Spurious as an assertion of the importance of friendship in the face of loss and despair. The loss in question seems to be connected to an inability to make connections, to make sense of the world. The world here is like that described by Beckett in ‘The Lost Ones’, an ‘Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain.’ There is no escaping the search, in Beckett’s formulation, but neither is there any hope for closure. Are Lars and W., the protagonists of this novel, each other's lost one? Is the promise of Spurious that friendship, in all its tender brutality, all its wretched neediness, is still the quality that we search for above all others? It seems telling that this novel, which some reviewers have found plotless, meandering, should finish with the lucid observation that "the plain is the friendship between us on which we are both lost".

Richard Elliott, Not the Booker review

Blows

He's tried to put me out of my misery, W. says. God knows, he's tried. Hasn't everyone? No one had tried hard enough, that's what W. discerned when we first met. And it became his task, to try hard enough. And what a task! How many times has he tried? How many emails has he sent?

But it won't get through, W. says. I won't hear him. He's resorted to blows, W. says, but it’s like beating a big, dumb animal. It seems pointless and cruel. How can I understand why I am being beaten? I bellow, that’s all. It’s perfectly senseless to me.

He’s drawn pictures, W. says. He’s scrawled red lines across my work, but I have never understood; I’ve carried on regardless.

No!. he writes in the margin. Rubbish!, he writes, underscoring the word several times, his biro piercing the paper. But still I continue. Still I go on, one page after another.

The Argumentum Ad Misericordiam

The argumentum ad misericordiam, that's the name for it, W. says, my basic scholarly move. It's the fallacy of appealing to pity or sympathy, which in my case is implied in the state of the speaker: my bloodshot eyes, my general decay. Don't I always give my presentations as though on my knees?, W. says.

It's as though I'm praying for mercy, W. says, although it's also, no doubt, a plea to put me out of my misery. Kill me now, that's what my presentations say. Don't spare me. Which is why, inevitably, I am spared. It would be too easy to destroy me, W. says. And who would clean up afterwards?

Oblivion

He knows what will happen, W. says. Gradually, he'll be forgotten. Gradually, his presence will fade from everyone's life. – 'Where's W.?', they'll ask at first. But later, they will only have a sense of absence, with no knowledge of its cause. And later still, there will be no absence either. Life will be complete again, without tear. – ‘Even you’, W. says. ‘Even you will forget me'. And then, 'especially you'. 

Making A Run For It

He had been waiting for the end, W. says, and still the end surprised him. That’s the lesson, he says: the end will always come too soon. The end will be there, tapping on the window …

They'll put a sack on your head. They'll lead you through the forest. They'll make you kneel … Will you cry out for mercy? Will you accept your fate solemnly, with dignity? Or will you piss and shit yourself in fear? Will you make a run for it before braining yourself on a tree?

For what cause are you dying? You don't know. You'll never understand. It's beyond you, your role in all this. What is certain is that you must die. Your time has come. You thought you had years – decades – but your time has passed, you've outlived your time, this is it …

W. is making a run for it, he says, sack on head. Any moment now, he’ll brain himself on a tree …

Murmurs

Where's it all going? Where's it all leading? Is there a pattern? Is the pattern falling apart? W.'s in the dark, and it's not a propitious darkness. It is not a resting place. There are terrible stirrings out there. Murmurs.

Something is awakening. Something is turning in its sleep. And as it turns, we turn too. Will our lives make sense one day, when it wakes? Will it all become clear on the day another part of us stands and stretches in the sun? 

I will be speaking in London on the 10th November alongside Michael Stewart, Julian Gough, Mark Thwaite and Sam Jordison at a Not the Booker celebration and online criticism event on 10th November.

It will run from 7.00-8.30 PM at the Book Club at 100 Leonard Street, Shoreditch, EC2A 4RH, and is hosted by Melville House publishing house. For more details, see here.

(Apologies to the person with whom I was corresponding about David Markson – I accidentially deleted your email and contact details. Please do get back in contact.)

I'm discussed alongside Lee Rourke and Tom McCarthy in Daniel Davis Wood's academic essay, 'Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman: 9/11 as a Crisis of Confidence in American Literary Aesthetics'.

Not Thinking

When did you know?, W. says with great insistence. When did you know you weren't going to amount to anything? Did I know?, he asks, because sometimes he suspects I never did. Well he knows at any rate for both of us. Neither of us are going to amount to anything!, he says with finality. Neither of us! Anything!, he says imperiously.

We might carry on as if we're going to amount to anything, W. says, but that does not alter the fact that we're not going to amount to anything. We haven't had a single thought of our own, for one thing, W. says. Not one!

Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking, I say to W., remembering Heidegger. Most thought provoking is that you think you are thinking, says W. Because you do, don't you?

A Lower Branch

The kernel is in Poland, W. often says. The secret is in Poland. But what does he mean? we run through our memories. Our Polish adventure! When were we happier? It all came together there. In a real sense, it all began.

There we were, ambassadors for our country, in our teeshirts and jungle-print shorts. There we were, intellectual delegates, who had a civic reception. Wasn't it the mayor of Wroclaw who greeted us? Of course, the welcoming committee in Wroclaw looked at us in bemusement: was this the best Britain had to offer? – 'And that was before they heard you go on about blowholes over dinner', W. says. That was before the real fiasco began, he says, when we re-enacted the primal scene for them on the dancefloor. It's a British dance move, we told them. It's what we do on British dancefloors, but they looked away from us appalled.

But they treated us with European grace. We attended a grill party in the sun – that's what they called it, a grill party. There were sausages and beer. We're a loutish people, we told them. Don't expect anything from us. We told them we'd disappoint them, we warned them in advance, but after a while, they seemed to find us charming.

I think we won them over, in some sense, W. says. They came to like our inanities. To them, we were like a race apart, like elves or something. A lower branch on the human tree. Once they knew they could expect very little, it was okay. We were free from any expectations.

Yes, that's where it all began, W. and I agree. Free from our hosts' expectations, we also became freer from our own. It was then, in our jungle-print shorts, that we accepted what we were.