Lars Iyer - Dogma

“It’s wonderful. I’d recommend the book for its insults alone.”

— SAM JORDISON, THE GUARDIAN

“Fearsomely funny.”

— THE WASHINGTON POST

“Viciously funny.”

— SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“I’m still laughing, and it’s days later.”

— THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

“A tiny marvel.… [A] wonderfully monstrous creation.”

— STEVEN POOLE, THE GUARDIAN

“This novel has a seductive way of always doubling back on itself, scorching the earth but extracting its own strange brand of laughter from its commitment to despair.”

— THE BELIEVER

“Ought to be unreadable, but manages to be intelligent, wildly entertaining, and unexpectedly moving instead.”

— THE MILLIONS

“[A] hilarious and eminently quotable debut novel.”

— MODERN PAINTERS

“ Spurious is full of paradox. It’s about everything and nothing. It’s a funny book which uses exclamation marks (I know!). It provokes thought while evading easy understanding. Its characters speak simply about knotty concepts.… [I stopped] on almost every page to smile, think, or sense a cartoon lightbulb of understanding begin to glow above my head before popping out just as I concentrated on it.”

— JOHN SELF, ASYLUM

“Evoking literary duos like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Othello and Iago, Iyer’s portrait of two insufferable academics fumbling for enlightenment illustrates what the author comically calls the most honorable cruelty: friendship.”

— ERIK MORSE, BOOKFORUM

“ Spurious is an amusing take on intellectual frustration and anomie, its two characters going through the motions in a world where it’s unclear what the right motions are any longer.”

— THE COMPLETE REVIEW

“A tragic mein … undercuts the sheer hilarity of Lars Iyer’s Spurious.… To read Spurious is to discuss Kafka’s The Castle and farts in one exacting sentence — all the while reeking of gin.”

— NYLON

“Iyer’s playfully cerebral debut [is] … piquant, often hilarious, and gutsy.”

— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“The novel is addictive and immersive and funny and disturbing and maddeningly repetitive, all at once. For something that reads like the travelogue of a mind (or minds) going in endless circles, it’s fantastically good.”

— THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

You should never learn from your mistakes, W. says. He never has, he says, which is why he associates with me. And nor have I learned from my mistakes, in all the years of our collaboration. Because I am incapable of learning.

Table manners, the art of conversation: what hasn’t he tried to teach me? But I have barely learnt to keep my trousers on, W. says. I have barely learnt to sip my tea.

Even today, as we walk through the gorse towards the shore, he feels as though he’s taking a lunatic out on day release, W. says. Listing my shortcomings above the sound of the breakers, he knows I’ve already forgotten everything he’s said.

The roaring of the sea is like the roaring of my stupidity, W. says. It’s a terrible sound, but a magnificent one, too. It’s the sound of unlearning, he says. It’s the sound of Lars , of the chaos that undoes every idea.

My stupidity: that’s what saves him, W. says. If it weren’t for my stupidity, where would he be? He wouldn’t have learnt the fundamental lesson, W. says. He wouldn’t have understood that the great tasks of thought must begin from a kind of non -thought, that achievement — real achievement — is only possible once you’ve passed through the most abject of failures.

What would Socrates have been, without knowing that he knew nothing? What would Nicholas of Cusa have been, without his learned ignorance ?

Isn’t that why he’s kept me close? W. says. Isn’t that why he’s refused to learn from his biggest mistake?

W. has no great love of nature, he says as we walk. The sublimity of nature, mountain peaks, the surging ocean, all that: it means nothing to him. He’s a man of the city, W. says. And if we’re out of the city today— apolis , as the Greeks would say — it is only to return to the city refreshed, catching the bus back from Cawsand to Plymouth.

His city, W. says. But not for much longer. By what cruel fate will he be made to leave? For what reason will he be forced out ? He knows the time will come. He’s always known it, which has made his relationship to the city that much more intense. He’s always known the city would slip through his fingers .

Anyway, he’s glad to be out of the college for the day, W. says, as the path rises into Cawsand. He’s glad I’ve flown in from the north. There are rumours in the corridors, he says. There are murmurings in the quadrangle. Compulsory redundancies … the restructuring of the college … the closure of whole departments, whole faculties … It’s a bit like ancient Rome, before they stabbed Caesar to death, W. says.

Of course, he’ll have to leave if he loses his job, W. says. He’ll have to take to the roads. Because there’s no work here, not in Plymouth, he says.

And won’t it be the same for me? Won’t I eventually be driven out of my city? — ‘Don’t think you’re safe’, W. says. ‘Don’t think you’re going to live out your life in the pubs of Newcastle’.

‘They’re coming to get us’, W. says. Who? Who’s coming? I ask him. He’s not sure. But somewhere, far away, our fate has already been decided.

The end is coming, W. says, he’s sure of that. Our end, or the end of the world? — ‘Both!’, W. says. The one is inseparable from the other. Do I see it as he does? Is he the only one who can see the signs?

He sees them even now, on this sunny day in Cawsand. He sees them in our honey beer, W. says. In the dog that drops a stone at my feet, wanting me to play with it. In the narrowness of the three-storeyed house opposite. In the name of the pub where we are drinking: The Rising Sun . And in me, too? — ‘In you above all’, W. says.

But what sun will rise over us? W. asks, as he drains his second pint. A black sun, he says. A sun of ashes and darkness. He sees the image in his mind’s eye: the man and boy of The Road , pushing a shopping cart down an empty highway. Only, in our case, it’ll be two men, squabbling over whose turn it is to ride in the cart. Two men with ashes in their hair, exiled from their cities and from all cities.

At the bus stop, W. tells me about his current intellectual projects. They can be summed up under the general heading, capitalism and religion , he says. The ‘and’ is designed to be provocative, W. says. He wants to provoke the new atheists , he says. There’s nothing more infuriating than the new atheists .

Of course, by religion, W. means Judaism. And by Judaism, he means the Judaism of Cohen and Rosenzweig. If only the new atheists could read Rosenzweig and Cohen, W. says. If only he could read, really read, Rosenzweig and Cohen, he says.

And by capitalism? Our world, W. says. Our whole lives … Hasn’t capitalism entered a new phase? W. says. Hasn’t it entered every particle, element and moment of our lives?

Capitalism and religion … He’d appreciate my input as a Hindu, W. says, as the bus arrives. What would a Hindu make of all this? he wonders. But he knows I have no answer.

My Hinduism has no depth , W. says. He can’t believe in it, not really. — ‘Convince me’, he says. ‘Convince me you’re a Hindu. In what does your Hinduism consist?’