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Antiheros of Our Time

A familiar cliché holds that philosophy deals with thinking about thinking, a metacognition that appears to be signally lacking in L, the provincial English university philosopher who narrates Spurious. The irony of course is that a man paid to teach self-reflexive thought is shown to be incapable of even rudimentary self-reflection (a bit like Jack Gladney, the Hitler scholar who can’t speak a word of German).

L’s blindness to self-experience seems to pervade every aspect of his life. In the book’s opening pages we meet W, the man condemned to serve as L’s eternal interlocutor, reproaching him for his inability to experience shame in the appropriate fashion: L feels shame, W complains, but is not ashamed of this shame.

W doesn’t so much correct L as help narrate his experience of the world. L plays the ape, W jokes about it, though the joke seems to be on him; ‘what do I get out of it’, he asks himself constantly. W dreams of seriousness, but his life appears to consist in endlessly escaping the pretentions of seriousness to find the nearest pub, where he sits and amuses himself with L’s apishness. He is an admirer of Continental Europe, a fetishised place of gentle manners and civility, but most of his trips there seem to end in the gutters with L, drunk. He once heard something about a stupid messiah, but he can’t remember exactly what it was he heard, or where he heard it. He is sure it was at an academic event though, which means that, even if it’s not true, the messiah is invested with the type of seriousness he clings to.

If W resembles the superfluous man of Lermontov then L resembles bicameral man of Jaynes, operating through right brained whisperings in which he fails to recognise his own voice. Troubled by their shortcomings, W and L set out in search of a leader who might dictate the great project of their lives. Unfortunately the leaders they find offer only trite sound bites (‘I’m not interesting’ one of them says, ‘but my thoughts are interesting’, the kind of thing a stock character in a Woody Allen film might say).

At one point W laments that their fates matter to no one, not even to themselves, confirmation that the apocalyptic visions and the desperate search for a leader belong to the same void; the phalanx is formed, it just needs to be told where to march. W’s superfluous man is a token representing an age where even the relative comforts of university lecturer can’t prevent the onset of despair.

When L pays a visit W ‘opens a bottle of Chablis . . unwraps a block of Emmenthal and brings out his sliced meats’ along with olives and home-made bread. A more solidly middle-class existence could not be conceived (L is less comfortable and seems to be plagued by a mysterious damp that welcomes him home, a perverse contrast with the friendly dog W has invents for his own book.) Yet as their evenings together unfold both are plagued by a lack of purpose.

Conversations swing wildly from the opiate to the amphetamine, from indulging a self-consciously stupid lassitude to a panicked febricity. L plans to become a scholar of Sanskrit one week, of music the next, a frantic search for the final score that will consume his life. At the same time however he can’t be bothered to read W’s book properly, and generally his ambitions collapse into yet more wasted time.

W is less desultory in this respect, and is able to remain focused on Talmudic philosophy, though things don’t seem to work out any better for him; his volumes of Rosenweig are annotated with question marks, he ploughs through Cohen but admits he may as well be reading it in Dutch.

This then is the paradox of their lives: they are able to sit at ease, wasting whole stretches of the night staring at ceilings or TVs, yet they do so in the grip of a mania that tells them they are trapped. But if their apocalyptic premonitions are true, wouldn’t the academic leader’s stuffy seriousness be the height of stupidity? And if that’s true then wouldn’t L’s ethereal persona bear the mark of Messianic genius? And wouldn’t their conspicuous incongruity with this world means they themselves are the very leaders they seek?

Their second false-dawn messiah tells them pompously of ‘the interlacing of his life and thought’, an interlacing L & W seem to pull off later in the book when, in contrast to the off-the-peg existentialism of sleek black conference wear, they sit ‘fat and blousy’ at the bar. Mercifully their leaders abandon them. Mercifully W never finds serious conversation and L never tries to think about why he is interesting. Mercifully they do manage to find a pub, and we get to hear about it.

James Wood, Not the Booker review

Bleak, Hopeless, Thought-provoking, Funny

Philosophers can find honesty and modesty a tricky subject, the temptation to add validity to awkward and chaotic intellectualism by simply taking themselves very, very seriously often proves to be unavoidably seductive.

Lars Iyer's 'Spurious' doesn't suffer in this way, much of the enjoyment in reading the book is in the access you are granted to the shortcomings of its characters. Sneer, snipe and scoff along with W. and Lars at their pretentions and vanity, their silliness and pointlessness, their drunkenness and restlessness. Lars self-deprecates. W. verbally defecates on Lars. We enjoy this, it is funny and delivered with wit and spite but mostly it's the pie in face, pants down clownishness contrasted with real intelligence that makes this book worth owning, because despite all of their foolishness they are also worthwhile thinkers. The humour overall plays a lesser role than the weighty, articulate and stylish observations. The mild paralysis in the characters' lives is largely the result of the challenges of philosophical pursuits but it is also the origins of this book's humour.

'Spurious' is an unkempt journal of philosophers behaving uncannily like people; keep it with you for spontaneous thirty minute trips to the pub. Pick passages at random and enjoy their humour, modesty, Englishness and depth.

JKemmetmuller, Not the Booker review

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.