Lars Iyer's Blog, page 15

'Life needs to be struggled for'. New interview with Gayle Lazda for London Review Bookshop.

New 1 hour podcast interview with Patrick O'Connor on Thales' Well. I'm less than coherent, but it's about the philosophical aspects of Nietzsche and the Burbs. 

Review from the Sunday Times, 5th January 2020: 

A rock-music caper loaded with adolescent yearning.

Houman Barekat

Lars Iyer is not one for changing the record. Between 2011 and 2014 he published three short, satirical novels inspired by his time as a philosophy lecturer. The Spurious trilogy affectionately skewered the pretensions and anxieties of over-earnest intellectuals; a fourth nove, 2016's Wittgenstein Jr, ploughed a similar furrow. The theme is reprised in Nietzsche and the Burbs, albeit this time by focusing not on cloistered scholars but a gang of sixth-formers at a comprehensive in a Thames Valley suburb.

The narrator, Chandra, and his pals, Art, Merv and Paula, are united by a hatred of all things mainstream. When they're not tormenting their teachers with precocious backshat or sabotaging the annual cross-country ('Sure, we could have run. But we chose not to, like gods'), they enjoy knotty discussions about madness, suicide and the climate apocalypse. 

They befriend an engimatic new boy, whom they nickname Nietzsche on account of his brooding demeanour and love of philosophy, and invite him to join their dodgy band as lead singer. The group, rechristened Nietzsche and the Burbs, is plagued by creative differences: ringleader Art - who regards potato chips as 'false consciousness'because they keep the masses happy' - wants them to play 'tantric dub metal'; Paula denounces this as 'aural wanking' and would rather make music people can dance to. 

Iyer's co-protagonists don't entirely convince as a depiction of contemporary youth: when Chandra declares that 'No one will ever have been more bored than we are. More purely bored', he sounds more like a 1970s punk-rocker than a 21st-century digital native. Their cud-chewing - on the redemptive power of art, the yearning to transcend the banality of modern existence and so on - grows wearisome. 

But Iyer does a good line in pithy dialogue, and the landscape of late adolescence is evocatively rendered, encompassing everything from the 'Hieronymus Bosch grotesquerie of the PE changing rooms' to the thrill of anticipation of nights out: 'Why not secede, sit life out, bury ourselves in our bedrooms? Because of possibility. Because of what might happen'.

Download Cioran interview

Matthew Duffus reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs for The Critical Flame.

Leo Robson reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs for the Guardian:

Nietzsche and the Burbs review ��� deadpan philosophical comedy

Lars Iyer���s ambitious follow-up to Wittgenstein Jr tracks a gang of smart-aleck sixth formers as they explore nihilism in the suburbs

Lars Iyer���s follow-up to the celebrated Wittgenstein Jr is another attempt to treat his erstwhile academic specialism, European philosophy, as the basis for deadpan observational comedy. The more specific aim this time around is to examine the meaning of existence through the indulgent chatter, curricular and otherwise, of smart-aleck sixth-formers at a present- day comprehensive school in Wokingham, Berkshire. Topics include free will, the end of history, Gaia, wellbeing, the concept of ���basic needs���, Beckett���s play Endgame and the virtues of nothingness. The result is certainly creditable ��� vivid, tickling and spry. It���s also remarkably unkempt.

The narrator, Chandra, is firmly ensconced in a gang of four when he befriends the ���new kid���, a former private-school boy who physically resembles Friedrich Nietzsche (minus the moustache) and promotes a familiar nihilist agenda. Before long, Chandra and co have started a Dostoevsky book club and are on the hunt for an idiot���s guide to The Idiot and wondering how you pronounce the name of the Romanian-born essayist and Nietzsche-worshipper Cioran.

Iyer is eager to exploit the rich opportunities for comic juxtaposition. When it is discovered that the Beckett archives are held in nearby Reading, it���s taken as proof positive that there isn���t a God: Reading, the gang decide, is the ���opposite of Paris���, antimatter to Endgame���s matter. When Nietzsche ��� the new kid is never known by any other name ��� gets a part-time job at the local Asda, Chandra wonders how the best mind of his generation has ended up scooping peanut satay into tubs. And when the gang start a band that shares its name with the novel���s title, someone asks if they will really have performed the gig if no one is present to hear it.

But Iyer also sees past putative incongruities to something continuous or mutually illuminating ��� Berkshire as a cousin if not to Paris then perhaps to Nietzsche���s Basel, the suburbs not as an enemy of rumination but a breeding ground. Nietzsche���s blog is full of his responses to the spaces around him. ���Nothing can happen here,��� he writes. ���Unless the nothing-is-happening is itself an event.��� He even goes so far as to suggest that only in the suburbs is ���nihilism to be truly encountered���, though it might be said that neither tack ��� philosophy and mundanity as foes or as allies ��� is by this point exactly original.

Nietzsche and the Burbs isn���t really a philosophical novel: ideas are discussed and even dramatised, but not embodied. Questions about the elusiveness of reality or truth, embraced by the cast within the fictional world, have had no discernible impact on the way that world has been constructed. Despite the characters��� continental appetites, the tradition in which their creator is working proves to be sensible, chipper and English, and the writer that Nietzsche and the Burbs brings to mind isn���t Beckett or Maurice Blanchot, about whom Iyer has written two books, but Julian Barnes ��� in particular the early pages of his 2011 Booker winner The Sense of an Ending, another tale of sixth-formers dabbling in existential nihilism, which begins with a new boy joining the narrator���s gang.

It���s hard to avoid noting that Nietzsche and the Burbs, though less ambitious and portentous than that novel, is easily twice as long. That���s due partly to the routine-bound structure, with virtually every school day of exam term chronicled, and partly a product of rhetorical excess. If the set-up ��� insolent know-it-alls saying ���sir��� a lot ��� recalls Barnes, the language is derived more directly, and perhaps less coincidentally, from Martin Amis: the italics, the hyperbole, the acts of near-synonymous rephrasing, the endless lists ���

As in Amis���s work, a strange process occurs whereby something that looks like shorthand ��� a bit of thumbnail scene-setting ��� soon gives way to obsessive completism. The threat of prose-poetry often hovers and doesn���t always dissipate. (���There was no dignity in the PE changing rooms. There were no human rights, in the PE changing rooms. The Geneva convention didn���t hold in the PE changing rooms.��� And so on.) Iyer���s attempts at sadsack sentiment read like Amis on an off-day: ���Everyone���s fucking everyone and no one���s fucking us.��� ���The worst thing about Wokingham is that it smiles back at your despair. Wokingham hopes that you���ll have a nice day in your despair.���

What���s frustrating about these local tendencies is that the novel is also distinguished by genuine conceptual compactness. Iyer makes light work of exploring the ways in which a 19th-century German philosopher, or his present-day descendant and doppelganger, would and wouldn���t feel right at home in the home counties. But his tendency to make the reader live that reality, in all its blog-friendly and italics-worthy drabness, seems less like a crucial part of the project ��� intentional immersiveness, perhaps, or self-conscious garrulity ��� than a straightforward failure of craft.

Leo Robson reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs for the Guardian.

Marshal Zeringue interviews me for My Book the Movie at Campaign for the American Reader. 

And interviews me for P.69 for the same blog.

Publishers Weekly review Nietzsche and the Burbs:

In this devastatingly withering follow-up to 2014���s Wittgenstein Jr., Iyer turns his keen eye and sharp sense of humor to the suburbs. There���s a new boy in the London suburb of Wokingham, recently transferred from a posh private school after he lost his scholarship. He���s taken in by his new high school���s resident group of misfit creative types, who name him Nietzsche, after his pseudo-deep blog and the giant NIHILISM scrawled across his notebook. Though one of the misfits, Chandra, an Indian boy with creative writing ambitions, is technically the narrator, the novel is written from a plural first-person perspective that folds together Chandra���s voice with those of his friends, all of whom are deeply devoted to two things: their death metal band and cynicism. Nietzsche, then, is the perfect lead singer for a band that makes ���the music that comes after music. Fucking ghost music, man.��� Despite their cynicism and aversion to any platitudes, the nihilist heroes discover the sincere thrill of being young in high school, as they run through a gamut of heartbreaking, hilarious, and exhilarating experiences with love, drugs, and the immediate and terminal future. The individual characters tend to get lost in Iyer���s dense narration, and they are occasionally too clever for cleverness���s sake. But readers will be endeared by Iyer���s skillful portrayal of their deep tenderness and uncertainty despite it all, even if they���d hate for readers to know it. (Dec.)

Nietzsche and the Burbs is out now in the US. Readers in the UK will have to wait until January 9th.

London launch of Nietzsche and the Burbs at the London Review Bookshop on January 28th, with Jon Day at 7PM. It's a ticketed event (buy them here) - they sold out before the day last time. News of another London event coming soon.