Outside Literature: Lars Iyer on Exodus

Tim Smyth talks to Iyer about his latest novel

Lars Iyer, Exodus

From The Quarterly Conversation:

Since the appearance of his novel, Spurious, in 2011, Lars Iyer has made a challenging and vigorous contribution to our sense of the importance of literature and thought in our vexed cultural moment. The intellectual anguish and inventive bickering of his two UK philosophy professors sees him steer a middle course between Mercier and Camier and Withnail and I. His combination of almost-total bleakness and bracing humour enables him to dip perilously close to despair, only to escape at the last minute.

With the sequel to Spurious, Dogma, Iyer confirmed his importance as part of an “enclave outside literature,” whose work extends the territory outside the contemporary canon to new and challenging distances. This novel extended W.’s and Lars’s itinerary across America, with little more than Plymouth Gin and the word omoi for company. As the humour deepens, so too does the despair, recalling both the Thomas Bernhard of Frost and Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show.

The final instalment of Iyer’s trilogy, Exodus, is the funniest, most hopeful, most despairing, and most gin-soaked episode of the three. Despite the impossibility of true endings, it is a final instalment—and a satisfying one at that. I talked to Lars, via email, over the course of nearly two months, during which we talked about hot tubs, the Bible, endings, and the collapsing borders of literature. [Read the Interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Lars Iyer reads from Dogma

A 40 minute video of Iyer reading at Northeastern University, Boston.

(via Spurious)

  Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka

Alex Shepard interviews the author of Spurious and Dogma

Lars Iyer

From a 2011 interview by Full Stop:

[In Spurious,] Lars and W. worship Kafka and wonder if they more resemble Kafka or Max Brod, his executor. Is Kafka one of your heroes? Do you, like Lars and W., think of yourself as more of a Max Brod than a Kafka?

I do not even see myself as a Brod! Max Brod was the most energetic of men – he wrote a great deal, he was active in various intellectual circles – and he placed himself most genuinely in the service of others. A remarkable combination. W. and Lars seem to form the entirety of each other’s intellectual circle, and the question whether they actually help anybody is an open one.

Am I a Brod? But I wrote a novel. And one writes novels, I think, in the hope that one might be more than a Brod. Brod, no doubt, wanted to be more than a Brod. At what stage did he realise that he was no Kafka? My argument: he never realised it. Perhaps to write a novel is to be a Brod who wants to be Kafka. And perhaps that’s why Kafka couldn’t finish his own novels. He, too, in his own way, was a Brod.

But we live in a different time from Kafka’s, when the hope of being a Kafka will result in something altogether different than becoming Kafka. Kafka’s displaced relations to Jewish traditions have their counterparts today, perhaps, in our displaced relations with the novel, and with figures like Kafka. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance

Philosophical essay available on Spurious

In a 2005 article originally published in Parallax, Lars Iyer summarises his book on Maurice Blanchot, Blanchot's Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical:

'For Blanchot, like the early Levinas, the world of things is a dead world, but it is one that is not inert. It is a dead world, but one possessed of a strange kind of life – a dying that is active, a force of becoming that is the experience of the being of things. How can being be brought together with becoming? The difference between beings and being, as Levinas and Blanchot will present it, is given in the relation between the thing and its image. As readers will know, for Levinas and Blanchot it as though, for them, the image was the condition of possibility of the thing and not the other way round. Broadly speaking, the image is what gives itself in the relation to the thing when it is turned from the tasks and projects to which we subordinate it, resisting the very impulse of our existence to create meaning, to, as it were, ‘exist’ things by bringing them towards us as potential tools or as potential raw material. It gives itself as what ‘in’ the thing exists over and above our interests. But even as it does so, its resistance captures my attention and struggles with it, escaping me even as it seems to offer itself to me. Yet I am not indifferent to it, and this is the point. The image of the thing no longer exists at any distance from me at all; fascinated, I am as though pressed by the thing against its image, as though the heart of the thing held me at what one commentator calls ‘its distance’.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Modernism Then and Now

A conversation published in 3:AM Magazine

In 3:AM Magazine, David Winters and Anthony Brown discuss modernism, then and now [Read More]

Andrew Gallix on the Death of Literature

Is literature a work of disappearance?

As part of The Guardian website's 'In Theory' series, Andrew Gallix discusses the role of contemporary literature, and the work of Tom McCarthy, Lee Rourke and Lars Iyer: 'By this token, the novels of Tom McCarthy, Lee Rourke and Iyer himself are not so much evidence of a nouveau roman revival as instances of a new type of hauntological fiction which explores the lost futures of Modernism.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• René Girard and Mimetic Desire
• Robbe-Grillet: 'Towards a New Novel'
• What is Hauntology?

3:AM Magazine Awards 2011

Samuel Beckett and Lars Iyer among those celebrated

The excellent cultural resource that is 3:AM Magazine has announced the winners of the 3:AM Awards 2011. Lars Iyer's Spurious picked up a gong for best novel of the year, while the second volume of Samuel Beckett's Letters (1941-1956) won for best non-fiction. An announcement of all the winners, which includes categories for film, publishing, blogging, and music, can be found on the 3:AM Magazine website. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Samuel Beckett Letters win MLA Award
• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Literary influences in Lars Iyer's Spurious

Will Spurious win the Not the Booker Prize 2011?

Your chance to vote

Lars Iyer, Spurious

Lars Iyer's first book, Spurious, has been nominated to receive The Guardian's Not The Booker Prize 2011. But will it win? You might have the deciding vote on this one.

If you enjoyed Spurious, you can vote for it on The Guardian website. Details on how to vote can be found on Lars Iyer's website. [Read More]

The deadline is midnight (GMT) on 17 October.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer, Spurious
• Literary influences in Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking

Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online

Snippets of Iyer's sequel to Spurious will be posted on website

Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, has announced via Twitter that extracts from a forthcoming sequel shall be posted 'from today' on the Spurious website. The sequel is entitled Dogma, and will be published by Melville House in February 2012. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept

Featured online interview

Biblioklept is featuring a fascinating interview with Spurious author Lars Iyer [Read More]

Literary influences in Lars Iyer's Spurious

Literature blogs voice appreciation for Iyer's debut

John Self reviews Lars Iyer's new novel Spurious over at Asylum: 'Subjects and people recur: Béla Tarr, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Rosenzweig. Not mentioned, but all over the book, are Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett. The narrative container of Lars reporting W.’s thoughts is pure Old Masters, and Vladimir and Estragon could not be more simultaneously comic and tragic. “These are the end times, but who knows it but us?”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Lars Iyer, Spurious

Hit website, Spurious, adapted as a book

Lars Iyer, Spurious

Many readers of A Piece of Monologue will already be somewhat familiar with Lars Iyer. Since 2003, his website, Spurious, has been a playful source of absurd banter on literature, philosophy and everyday life. But you may not know that many of the stories and asides from the original site have been adapted as a book, available from Melville House.

Take a look at the Publisher's page for critical responses, and a free online extract:

In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Show comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences where they serve better gin.

Another reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no on seems to know what to do about. Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled to solve some major philosophical questions (such as "Why?") and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus... before it's too late. Or, he has to move.

Melville House Publishing

Publisher Page: Lars Iyer, Spurious, Melville House Publishing