On Lars Iyer’s Spurious

Lars Iyer’s Spurious extends the fragmentary spirit of his long-running blog into a loose, semi-coherent narrative. Though the book carries over the blog’s sensibility: mock-philosophical dialogues, absurd despair, intoxicated musings, it shapes the material into something that feels more deliberate.

The novel follows two intellectuals, W. and Lars, stumbling through a life of failed thought, secondhand culture, and self-inflicted ruin. Its humour is sharper than it first appears: not merely comic, but a way of inhabiting failure, making failure itself into a form of companionship. If the conversations between W. and Lars often recall the stylised patter of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, their concerns are weightier: philosophy, literature, apocalypse, the decay of seriousness itself.

Spurious reads best when approached in a single sitting. Its repetitions and dissolutions are intentional, wearing down the reader’s expectations of character development or resolution. Beneath the laughter, there is a persistent undertow of real melancholy.

It would be easy to call Spurious minor, but the better word is precise: it knows exactly the scale it wants to operate at, and resists enlarging itself to suit anyone’s expectations. What it offers is a particular kind of pleasure, comic, self-thwarted, strangely sincere, that becomes rarer the more closely you look for it.