Opening the pages of Spurious one finds oneself eavesdropping on two rather self-obsessed characters, obsessed in fact to the point of acknowledging their own self-obsession and mocking it; quite cruelly mocking their own pretensions not only about literature, philosophy and the world at large, not only about each other's own pretensions and profuse failings, but most importantly and above all that most abhorrent of pretensions, that most abysmal of failings: holding to the very notion of a self. As the pages fly by--after all, for all its gravitas and references to"big ideas" (only to shoot them down) reading Spurious is humorous breeze--one starts to suspect that this is not a dialogue between an overly-serious protagonist and his curmudgeonly companion, but rather the groans and rattling of the very infrastructure propping up the Cartesian ego, emitted by the strains of bearing its own load together with the ever-burgeoning substructures required by the weaknesses arising from its own existence and the absurd effort to prevent or at least prolong its inevitable collapse. Spurious indeed, and if ever a work of literature was worthy of an anti-prize then surely none could be more deserving.
Pensum, Not the Booker review