Lars Iyer's Spurious is a creation of idiosyncratic genius. Part academic satire, part Beckettian meditation on the absurdity of waiting, and part Jewish mysticism Spurious is a work that is at once hilarious, tragic and strangely redemptive. The two protagonist's W. and Lars are cast in the same predicament as Beckett's Godot. Two people cast in a situation who irritate the hell out of each other within a situation which imposes a warmly constrained friendship on themselves. The characters exude an extra air of the pathetic given that their banter only ever reaches the machine gun prattle of academic rivalry. They wait in state of constant disappointment, matched by the ever rising damp in Lars’ flat. The incessant hopeless vigilance for the coming apocalypse demonstrates the passive quietism of the contemporary intellectual. Iyer’s Spurious takes the academic satire to the existential level. Academic satire is no longer devoted to the unworldliness of the academic and their petty jealousies, but begins to own up to the static paralysis of the academy in general. In Spurious we begin to see the depths from thinkers must arouse themselves.
Deomni, Not the Booker review