Category: Uncategorized

'We tried to tell them, didn't we?', says W. Yes, we tried to tell them. – 'We tried to warn them?' Yes, we tried to warn them. Our lives were living warnings. We all but set ourselves on fire. We all but soiled ourselves in public. – 'Actually, you did soil yourself in public, didn't you?', W. says.

We felt things. That was undeniable. We set out our coracles on great currents of feeling. We were felt, we were sure of that. Pathos opened its door to admit us. But did we think, too? Did thought take flight in us as feeling did? There are questions we can never answer, says W. It's for others to judge, he says.

What did they see as our eyes rolled upward? What, as we spoke in tongues and rolled on the floor? They must have thought we were on fire, though they couldn't see the flames, says W. That we were on fire from thought: did they think that? That thought itself set them aflame, like Olympic torches?

What impression did we leave, as we left the room? Was the light still dying in their eyes? Had they seen too much? Had they heard much too much? Did an angel with a fiery sword stand between us?

We felt things. Like great, dumb animals, we were only feeling. We thought like cattle lowing in the pasture. We thought like pigs snuffling in the dirt. What could we understand of what we were called to do?

But we were called, W.'s sure of that. We felt things. We felt the apocalypse approaching. We knew it, as animals know when an earthquake's coming. We sent up our howls into the night.

Don't you see?, we said to people. Don't you feel it?, we said, grabbing them by the lapels. We all but carried placards out into the street. The end is nigh: isn't that what wrote itself across every page of our papers? Repent: didn't that word repeat itself in everything we said?

Sometimes W. feels like one of the pillar saints, like Simon Stylites in Syria in the first century AD, waiting for the Messiah to return. When's he coming, the anointed one? When will he be redeemed?

Right now, W.'s a little higher than me. He's perched on his pillar, reading his books in the great languages of Europe. He's reading, he's taken notes in the great languages, ancient and modern, and there I am at the base, masturbating in the dust. 

How's your Latin?, says W. And your Greek? Say omoi again, go on. That's all you can say, isn't it: omoi, omoi, omoi?

Omoi, that's what W. wants to say. Or oy vey! Or yuy! What sound should you make at the end, to acknowledge the end? Yuy! It's all over. Oy vey! We're done for. Omoi, omoi: the lament of Antigone and her siblings as their father was taken away. No, that was popoi. Popoi, popoi, popoi, that's what they say. – 'Are you listening down there?', W. says.

Guardian review here.

Reviews/mentions of Spurious are catalogued here.

One day, he says, and this is his hope, his hope against hope, I'm going to surprise everyone with my salmon-leap, W. says. One day, catching everyone unawares, there will be my great leap upstream -my leap, flashing the light back from my scales, my sunshine-touched leap against the current of my own idiocy: that's what he believes, somehow or other. He still believes it; still sees it: up and above the foaming water. Up and forming a great flashing arc …

And where will I be going? In the opposite direction to my dissoluteness and squalor. In the opposite direction to my compromise and half-measures. And where will he be -he, W.? Leaping with me, he says. Leaping, his arching interlinked with my own.

One day, I'll surprise you all. One day, I'll really surprise you … That's what you say to yourself in brown pub interiors, isn't it?, W. says. But drunks are full of a messianic sense of self. They're full of a sense of great earthly mission. Just listen for a moment, that's what the drunk says. Listen – just listen!

And when he does? When he gives me the floor? Nothing, he says. Silence, he says. And the great roar of my stupidity.

There are some thoughts that will be forever beyond us, says W. The thought of our own stupidity for example – even that's beyond us. We'll never understand, really understand, the depths of our stupidity, W. says. Since we've failed, and could do nothing but fail, we can never really understand the extent of our failure, the extent of stupidity.

Oh he has some sense of it, W. says. More than I have, but then he's more intelligent than I am. But he's not intelligent enough! That's his tragedy, W. says. Mind you, if he were intelligent enough, wouldn't he kill himself out of shame because of his stupidity? Wouldn't he realise just how immeasurably he had failed? Ah, but if he were intelligent enough, he wouldn't be stupid, W. says.

You can't feign friendliness, W. says. You can't feign interest. In the end, the art of conversation is entirely alien to me, W. says. The art of greeting people.When he did try and teach me, it led to disaster. I bellow. Hello!, I cry in my loudest voice. – 'You scare people'.

In the end, no one wants to talk to me because I don't want to talk to them. They want to escape because I want to escape. I make them edgy because I'm edgy. – 'You want to escape! You want to be out of there!' Can I blame them that they want the same?

W. is always amused in those moments when the power to speak deserts me, and the other person has to guess what I want. It invariably happens when it's most urgent, and I have to be most succinct: a great stuttering and stammering. A great foaming at the mouth. – 'You can't get a word out, can you?', W. invariably says, laughing. 'My God! Gesture! Mime! What is it? More food? Something else to drink?'

'You don't actually know anything, do you?', W. says. 'You've got no body of knowledge'. W. has ancient Hebrew, of course, and he can play classical guitar. And there are whole philosophical oeuvres with which he is familiar. – 'You see, I know something. What do you know?' I've read about things, he knows that, W. says. I've read about ancient Greek and about ancient Sanskrit. I've read about whole philosophical oeuvres. But reading about things is not a reading of the things themselves. 

'You can only get so far as a Hindu scholar with Hinduism For Idiots as your guide', W. says. Why haven't I learnt that yet? – 'Secondary literature! You're always reading secondary literature! No one reads secondary literature but you'. W. is a man of primary literature, he says, and always in the original language. Primary literature, and always as obscure and half-forgotten as possible.

W.'s reading a book of Latin philosophical phrases. – 'Ah, here's something that applies to you: Barba non facit philosophum. A beard does not make a philosopher'. What does eo ipso mean? What's the difference between modus tollens and modus ponens? – 'Tabula rasa: I know you know that. And conatus – even you must know that'.

Spurious was released in the USA and Canada on January 25th, and will be released in the UK and elsewhere on March 24th.

Here's a list of the reviews so far:

San Francisco Chronicle, by Kevin Canfield, Feb 27th 2011.

The Millions, by Emily S. John Mandel, Feb 22nd 2011.

Known Unknowns, by Emmett Stinson, Feb 15th 2011.

KGB Bar Lit Magazine, by Linus Urgo, Feb 2011

Complete Review, M.A. Orthofer, 31st January 2011

Washington Post, Book World, by Carolyn See. 'Foolish Posturing Atop the Ivory Tower', 27th January 2011.

NYLON, not online, in a co-review with Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning. Review by Erinrose Mager:

A tragic mien, too, undercuts the sheer hilarity of Lars Iyer’s Spurious (Melville House). “Start with these letters on a piece of paper: s-p-i-n-o-z-a,” quips W., our narrator’s companion and co-philosopher. “Ponder that in your stupidity.”Iyer, a British scholar of the theorist Blanchot, started a blog called Spurious in 2003, the content of which serves as the base for Iyer’s first novel. A narrative My Dinner with Andre turned on end, Spurious is peppered with moments of epistemic interrogation: “Were we the condition of thought?” “Are we capable of religious belief?” “Is he the Messiah? Am I?” W. and the narrator don’t want the reader to answer their questions, but rather for them to acknowledge the significance of their being posed in the first place. All along, they attempt to uncover a fungus that molders in the narrator’s flat, lest it consume the place entirely. The high/low binary we find in Browning’s prose appears again in Iyer’s; to read Spurious is to discuss Kafka’s The Castle and farts in one exacting sentence–all the while reeking of gin.

 Modern Painters, by Scott Indrisek (not online), February 2011:

Two “mystics of the idiotic” argue over their own insufficiencies in this hilarious and eminently quotable debut novel. The essentially plotless tale portrays unconventional friendship and crushing self-doubt, and circles around various obsessions: Kafka, booze, the Messiah, genius, and the lack thereof. “Our position is structural, we’ve always been convinced of that,” laments the narrator. “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.” The pair awaits the end of the world while lamenting their own stupidity.

Book Forum, by Erik Morse, 25th Jan

LA Times, by Susan Salter Reynolds, from her 'Discoveries' column, 23rd Jan 2011

Publishers Weekly, not online, Jan 2011:

Two friends drink, walk in the English countryside, and talk (and talk and talk) in Iyer's playfully cerebral debut. The action–what there is of it–revolves around an unnamed Hindu narrator and his frenemy, a mopey professor known as W., who harbors a deep insecurity, is contemptuous of the narrator, and loves Kafka. The narrator, meanwhile, lives in a rotting home that's being taken over by a creeping fungus and suffers W.'s constant tongue lashings with a resigned cheeriness as the pair muse, debate, ponder, and talk endlessly about their places in the world. Iyer finds ways to weave in contemporary cultural artifacts, from film director Bela Tarr and rock group Godspeed You Black Emperor to a range of influential European intellectuals, though it's not clear whether the narrator and W. are more yin and yang or Abbott and Costello. It's a love it or hate it book: repetitive, too much in its own head, and self-satisfied, yes; but also piquant, often hilarious, and gutsy.

Sometimes, W. feels a terrible sickness, he says. He wants to vomit it all up – and not just everything he's eaten, everything he's drunk. Everything: his whole life, all that he is, his past, his present. To expel it. To get it all out, all that has been, as though he were only a foreign body in his own skin.

Everything – but more still, for doesn't he want to vomit up the world, too, everything that has happened, everything that is happening, the very fact of existence? Somehow, he is responsible for it, the catastrophe of the world. Somehow it all begins with him. – 'With you', he says.

The 80s are coming back, we agree with the taxi driver as we are driven out from Liverpool Station. It's going to be terrible. W. lived in Liverpool in the 80s, W. says. He knows what it was like here. He shudders. We're finished. Doomed. How long do you think we have?

W. feels like the boy in Mirror who cannot follow orders. Turn around!, he and the other cadets are told. He turns all the way round, 360 degrees, ending up facing in the opposite direction to his fellow cadets. Why can't you follow orders?, he's asked. You told me to turn, he says. And then, I don't understand, he says. His parents died in the Siege of Leningrad, a voice comes. Another cadet, off camera.

His parents are dead. He's turned right round. Later, we see him walking along, whistling. Whistling and weeping. That's what W. will be doing, he says, walking along like a dazed ox and whistling, tears running down his face … I don't understand, that's all he will say. It's all he will be able to say …

Steel shutters pulled down over shopfronts. Streets boarded up. Whole sections of the city abandoned. A world without pity. Without mercy. Great walls raised against the sea from which the migrants will come (the rest of the world scorched, baked black …)

Then methane will come steaming up from melting permafrost. Then it will come bubbling up, melting, from the ocean floor. Then the Arctic ice will melt away. Then the seas will turn to acid. Then the skies will turn black. Then the lights will go out, and there'll be blackness everywhere. We'll die lingering deaths. We'll die in the sludge, very slowly.

I don't understand, that's what W. will be saying, face down in the sludge. I don't understand.

Kevin Canfield reviews Spurious in the San Francisco Chronicle.

W. is reading from his notebooks.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.

That's from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, he says. Morbid symptoms – is that what we are? Is that our significance? No doubt, says W. No doubt.

He was waiting for the end, but the end overtook him, W. says. That was the surprise: the end overtook him, when he thought he was perfectly prepared for it. It's a 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? 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 you must die. Your time has come. The time's overtaken you. You thought you had years – decades – but your time is now, you've outlived your time, this is it …

They'll put a bullet in your temple. You'll jerk backwards, fall …

W. is already falling, he says. He's already in some strange limbo. Nothing seems real. He's been numbed. Am I still alive?, he wants to ask people. Do I still exist? He stood up, sack on head, and has made a run for it, W. says.

Any moment now, he'll brain himself on a tree. Any moment, and the bullet will hit him in the back of the neck. And in the meantime? He runs with no idea where he's going. He runs, sack on head, hands tied behind his back, like an idiot …

He was like a mayfly of thought, W. says. A single day, that's all he had. A single day – the whole of his life – in the sun. He spread his wings, rode the thermals upwards, felt the rush of the whole landscape beneath him – all thought, all thinkers … And now it's at an end? Now his life has a thinker has passed into oblivion?

I will have to remember, W. says, that's my task. He has granted me the great task of memory, of memorialising. I'm to write the introduction to his collected works; I'm to assemble them from his extant notes, his drafts, his marginalia. I'm to leave a record of his table-talk. Because he's heading out now, into the ice, W. says. He may be some time, he says, borrowing the words of Captain Oates.

What was it all for? What sense did it make? And what sense did he make of it, his life of the mind?, W. says. And what was my role in all of this, a Brod to his Kafka? Alas, he'll never know, he says. The ice-crystals are already forming on his beard. He feels cold, slightly weepy, and wants to sink down into the snow to die …

The final part of Spurious: An A to Z.

He wants to go back to his room for a nap, W. says. This is always his intention. An afternoon nap! A power-nap, as he calls it. He learned about it from a learned lecture at the university. Sleep for 20 minutes, and you fool the mind into thinking you've been asleep for much longer. 20 minutes! That's all he needs to regain his composure, W. says.

But I never let him nap, W. says. In fact I scorn his desire to nap and even the very notion of a nap. I keep him up all night with my inanities, W. says, and then I keep him awake all day with more inanities.

Of course, he's being unfair, W. agrees, as he is the night-owl in our friendship: he is the one who insists on staying up later than anyone, of following the night through all the way until dawn. How many nights have ended for us just as dawn was brightening the sky, and the first birds were starting to sing? How many nights with Satantango on the TV and The Star of Redemption open on the desk?

W. is a man who wants to see the night through he admits. But the afternoon … that's my time, W. concedes. That's when I come into my own. When everyone around me's tired and can put up no defence. When everyone's too tired to make me shut up, that's Lars-time, W. says. The afternoon: it's when I'm at my weakest and he's at his strongest, W. says. That's when I can really get going. It's when I wear everyone out.

I've always feared the afternoon, of course, that's what I've told him, W. says. He's always been struck by that: for him, the afternoon is a time of repose, of the gathering of strength, but for me, it's a time to fear.

It must be my years of unemployment, W. says. Didn't I say my afternoon sagged like a drooping washing-line? Didn't I complain of the eternullity of the afternoon, of its infinite wearing away? It was post-Neighbours time, the afternoon, that's what I told him. Post This Morning, post Vanessa Feltz, and deep into the time of Amercan cop-show repeats.

Colombo-time, W. says, I could never bear that, could I? Instead I go out for walk, that's what I told him. Instead, it was time for a cycle. Anything to be active! Anyting to have something to do! I'd head up to Tescos for a £1 box of sushi, wasn't that it? I'd head into the library for another video, all the time full of fear, all the time fearing – what? How did I put it?

It's no wonder I'm no night-owl, W. says. No wonder that I'm always worn out by dinnertime. Don't I have to revive myself, whenever I visit, with a fourpack of Stella and some pork scratchings? Isn't that always my pre-dinner snack?

W., meanwhile, would have been refreshed from his nap, if I'd allowed him to sleep. He would have come downstairs, a man refreshed, reborn, having had a power-nap, he says. But instead, I always insist on conversation, W. says. I always insist on wearing him out, he lying on the sofa, I sitting up at the table. I always insist we make some plan or another, W. says.

It's always planning-time, world-conquest-time, W. calls it. I have to pretend to some kind of hold on the future, W. has noticed. It's like a climber throwing up a grappling hook, or Spiderman swinging by his squirted webs. I'm never happy in the moment, W. says. I'm never happy in the belly of the afternoon.

Spurious reviewed by Emily St. John Mandel at The Millions.

These last few years, thought, the capacity to think is retreating from W. He's losing them one by one, his faculties, the organs of thought …

Species trapped on islands see changes in scale. They can become large – grotesquely large, says W., with giant tortoises and the like and Komodo dragons. Or they can become small – minaturising over the generations, W. says, like that species of human who lived until recently on that remote island. What were they called?

Homo Floresiensis, I tell him, after the name of the island, Flores. They shared their island with pygmy elephants and giant rats, I tell him. They hunted the rats on the back of pygmy elephants, or the pygmy elephants on the back of the rats, one of the two, I tell him.

Homo Floresiensis! They had great flat feet like yours, W. says, reading Wikipedia, and an improbably small brain, no doubt like yours. And they murmured rather than spoke. They whistled and hooted, just as I am a whistler and hooter.

I've become a Homo Floresiensis of thought, W. says. It's terrible. Didn't I used to appear intelligent? Even W. is forgetting. That's how it seemed, he says, improbable as it sounds. And now?

It's your flat, W. says. The squalor of your flat. It's the squalor of your life, your isolation, which is the equivalent of the island of Flores. But haven't I become larger rather than smaller? I'm like one of those giant rats, W. says. He's going to climb on a pigmy elephant and hunt me.

W. too is becoming a Homo Floresiensis of thought, that's what he fears. Isn't he becoming shorter by the day? Aren't his feet getting bigger and flatter? Isn't his brainpan shrinking and his chin looking a little more sloped?

He's following my example, W. says. He's declining, W. says. He's beginning to forget the higher ideas. Good God, he can barely count! He can barely add two numbers together! Is this what happened on the island of Flores? Is this where our collaboration has led him?

Sometimes in my company, W. feels like Jane Goodall, the one who did all that work with chimps, do I remember her? Jane Goodall, the chimp specialist, who not only studied chimps, but went to live with chimps, among them, slowly gaining their confidence and learning their ways.

What has he learned about me through his studies?, W. wonders. What's become clear to him? Admittedly, he first approached me as a collaborator. He first thought: here is a man I can think with. Here is a companion in thought.

Wasn't I the one he'd be waiting for? Wasn't I a thinker like he was, of the same cast, with the same inclinations, the same distastes? I seemed clever, too, back then. I spoke well. My voice resounded. – 'Your voice', W. says, 'what happened to it?'

Some seemed to have hopes for me. I was going somewhere, they thought. And W., too, concluded the same. Our collaboration – when did it begin? Several years ago now. Several years …

W. sought a thought-partner, for a companion in thought, but what happened? He became a witness to my decay. He saw me falling off into space like a lost satellite. I squandered it all, didn't I? Or perhaps it was never there, W. wonders that, too. Perhaps it was never there, my talent, my ability. Perhaps it was entirely an illusion, being what W. wanted to see.

A thought-companion, isn't that what W. wants? And instead what does he have? What has he become? A kind of zoo-keeper, he says. A chimp specialist.

Hadn't he become fascinated by my decline? Wasn't he watching, fascinated, for every twist in its story? He'd become an anthropologist, W. decided. No, a chimp-specialist. I'd brought him closer to chimp-observation than to thinking.

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation. 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 itself a ruse, an excuse, he says. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

It's time, W. says. No: it's after time. It's late. We're living on its lateness. We live a posthumous life.

Perhaps this is already hell, W. muses. Perhaps we already live in hell – is that it? They – the ones we once were – lived out their whole lives somewhere else, on earth – on the real earth. No doubt they committed terrible crimes. No doubt they were guilty of the worst, and we're what's left, serving out their sentence having forgotten everything … Hell, but perhaps it's heaven, for is life really so bad? Not now, not today, on this pleasant afternoon …

But perhaps, W. muses on another occasion, we're souls waiting to be reborn. Perhaps this is a great waiting room, this the time before a dentist's appointment, where nothing very important happens; you leaf through a magazine, you gaze out of the window …

But they've forgotten to call our names, haven't they? They've forgotten we are here, in the eternal waiting room. We've been left to ourselves, like abandoned children. And our seriousness is only a sham seriousness; our apocalypticism is only a kind of dressing up – and all our reading – the books of our philosophers – is only of the articles in some gossip magazine …

We are dead men, the walking dead. Oh God, the burden of disgust, of absolute disgust! We're disgusted with ourselves, we'll tell anyone who asks us. We've become terrible bores, speaking only of our disgust, and our self-disgust.

Exiled and wretched, Solomon Maimon – the ever-neglected Maimon – was said to give accounts of his disgrace for the price of a drink. And ours? Who will listen to the story of our disgrace? We have to buy them drinks, that's the terrible thing, W. says. We have to pay them to listen to us. Even our disgrace is uninteresting.

Is there any sight finer than this?, I say of the Tyne Bridge as it skims the roofs of the buildings in the gorge. You could touch its green underside from the highest of the roofgardens. The streetlamps, painted the same green, jut upwards from the bridge sides, one hundred and fifty feet in the air. And the great arch of the bridge rises a hundred feet higher … 

'You need a project', says W. 'You need something with which you can be occupied'. W. has his scholarly tasks, of course. He's even deigned to collaborate with me. But I've never taken it seriously, our collaboration, not really. I've never risen to the heights he envisaged for me.

Hadn't W. always wanted us to soar together in thought? Hadn't he pictured it in his minds as two larks looping and darting in flight – two larks, wings outstretched, whose flight was interlaced, interwoven, separate and apart; or as two never-resting swifts, following parallel channels in the air … We were never to rest. We'd live on the wing, one exploring this, one that, but always reuniting, always coming together in flight, in the onrush of flight, calling out to one another across the darkness …

To think like a javelin launched into space. To think like two javelins, launched in the same direction, arching through the air. To think as a body would fall – as two bodies fall, tumbling through space. Thinking be inevitable as falling under gravity. Thought would be our law, our fate … But we'd fall upwards into the sky … upwards into the heights of thought …

And instead? There is no flight; not mine, not W.'s. I am his cage, W. says. I am his aviary. What he could have been, if he left me behind! What skies he could have explored! But he knows that this, too, is an illusion; that my significance for him is as an excuse. He can blame me for everything. It's his fault, he can say, even as he knows nothing would have happened if he were free of me.

'The overexamined life is not worth living …' Great review of Spurious by Emmett Stinson.

How much time do we have left? You can't tell, says W. The conditions for the disaster are here, they're omnipresent, but when will it actually come? He reads book after book on the oil crisis and the climate crisis. He reads about the credit crunch and the futures market. The conditions for the end are here, but not the end itself, not yet.

Are we part of those conditions?, W. wonders sometimes. Are we part of the conditions of the collapse? He suspects so, he says. How else could he account for it? Somehow, at the end of the end, the door was open enough to let us in. Somehow, at the last minute, and in the last second of the last minute, it was time to admit us, but only as a kind of parody. Only as a kind of clown act, the auto-satire of philosophy.

Our eternal puppet show, says W. Our endless ventriloquy. Who's speaking through us? Who's using our voices? Sometimes he swears he hears a voice within our own, W. says. He can hear it, he says, on the threshold of audibility, a little like the grinding of the celestial spheres Pythagoras claimed to hear. Only this time it's idiocy that grinds itself out. This time it's an amazing force of idiocy, a solar wind sweeping through space.

The latest part of Spurious: an A to Z.