Spurious
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Review
''A tiny marvel of comically repetitive gloomery'' -Guardian
"Viciously funny." -San Francisco Chronicle
"What could be more fun than laughing at intellectuals? This, Lars Iyer's first book, sprang from his blog, Spurious, which sprang from his career as a philosophy lecturer at Newcastle University. I'm still laughing, and it's days later. But who, exactly, am I laughing at?" --The Los Angeles Times
"Viciously funny." ---San Francisco Chronicle
"What could be more fun than laughing at intellectuals? This, Lars Iyer's first book, sprang from his blog, Spurious, which sprang from his career as a philosophy lecturer at Newcastle University. I'm still laughing, and it's days later. But who, exactly, am I laughing at?" ---The Los Angeles Times
"Viciously funny." ---San Francisco Chronicle
"Viciously funny." -San Francisco Chronicle
"What could be more fun than laughing at intellectuals? This, Lars Iyer's first book, sprang from his blog, Spurious, which sprang from his career as a philosophy lecturer at Newcastle University. I'm still laughing, and it's days later. But who, exactly, am I laughing at?" --The Los Angeles Times
"Viciously funny." ---San Francisco Chronicle
"What could be more fun than laughing at intellectuals? This, Lars Iyer's first book, sprang from his blog, Spurious, which sprang from his career as a philosophy lecturer at Newcastle University. I'm still laughing, and it's days later. But who, exactly, am I laughing at?" ---The Los Angeles Times
"Viciously funny." ---San Francisco Chronicle
Product Description
In a raucous debut that summons up the classic Goon Show, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself and his friend, W. - albeit a slightly more successful friend - and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences where they serve better gin. Another reason for their yammering journeys is the fact that the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus and no one knows what can be done about it.
Spurious follows W. and Lars, who dream of great philosophical and literary deeds as they bumble drunkenly through Europe. It's a raucous debut novel that forever ping pongs between intellectual seriousness and absurdist British comedy. The novel speaks with equal wit and insight on Spinoza's Ethics, the virtues of 'man bags' and why Poles are the best drinkers. It is Franz Kafka, Laurel & Hardy, Thomas Bernhard, Ricky Gervais, Maurice Blanchot and Monty Python all at once. Witty, suicidal, slapstick, foolish and profound, Spurious marks the arrival of a singular and electric new literary voice.
Spurious follows W. and Lars, who dream of great philosophical and literary deeds as they bumble drunkenly through Europe. It's a raucous debut novel that forever ping pongs between intellectual seriousness and absurdist British comedy. The novel speaks with equal wit and insight on Spinoza's Ethics, the virtues of 'man bags' and why Poles are the best drinkers. It is Franz Kafka, Laurel & Hardy, Thomas Bernhard, Ricky Gervais, Maurice Blanchot and Monty Python all at once. Witty, suicidal, slapstick, foolish and profound, Spurious marks the arrival of a singular and electric new literary voice.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a novel that is deeply in love with philosophy, but acutely conscious of the inanities of human thinking and the seductive void 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 but 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. Readers of Beckett, Cioran and Pessoa will find themselves at home. I highly recommend the experience.
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 but 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. Readers of Beckett, Cioran and Pessoa will find themselves at home. I highly recommend the experience.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you never thought you'd find yourself laughing out loud at the prospect of human extinction, then Spurious is the book to make you do it. The interchanges between its two characters range from anticipating the coming of the apocalypse, that is, of financial and environmental collapse, to W.'s berating of Lars's constant snacking; from bemoaning the impossibility of thinking like the thinkers of "Old Europe" used to think, to W.'s advice on the importance of always carrying wipes in your manbag. The juxtaposition of grand themes, spoken about with an earnestness too close to the themes to be illuminating and too hyperbolic to ever be enough, and the minutiae of the character's minor illnesses and sartorial choices, the effect of alcohol on their mental life and the pattern of their digestion, feels like a comedy sketch in which you're constantly having the rug pulled from under your feet. But the minute sensibility of hypochondria in the face of disaster is, it turns out, seriously funny, in that dark way that death is sometimes funny: almost everything else is, by contrast, ridiculously unimportant, and nothing important avoids being utterly futile. Maybe humour is the only way we have of being true to the fact that we are only human. If so, then Spurious is, more than anything else, a very human novel.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
An engaging and witty read with laugh out loud moments. I was initially concerned that a deep understanding of literary concepts or philosophical ideas would be required to appreciate this book, but that is not the case! The balance between the character's ideas and discussions on life and the reality of living with mould is well written and hilarious! Looking forward to the sequel next year...
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