Lars Iyer's Blog, page 57

Mallarmé wanted to put all knowledge into a book.... But ...

Mallarmé wanted to put all knowledge into a book.... But in my opinion this book would be very ephemeral, since knowledge in itself is ephemeral. The book that would have a chance to survive, I think, is the book that destroys itself, that destroys itself in favour of another book that will prolong it.

Edmond Jabès, interviewed by Paul Auster

I ask Edmund Jabès:'You say you are an atheist. How can...

I ask Edmund Jabès:

'You say you are an atheist. How can you constantly write of God?'

'It is a word my culture has given me'.

Then he expands:

'It is a metaphor for nothingness, the infinite, for silence, death, for all that calls us into questio. It is the ultimate otherness'. or, as he puts it later, in the conversations with Marcel Cohen: 'For me the words "Jew" and "God" are, it is true, metaphors. "God" is the metaphor for emptiness; "Jew" stands for the torment of God, of emptiness.

Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence

Estanislao M. Orozco reviews Magma for Hermano Cerdo. M...

Estanislao M. Orozco reviews Magma for Hermano Cerdo.

Magma reviewed in the Spanish-language Vanity Fair.

Spurious, translated into Turkish by Elif Ersavci, is ...



Spurious, translated into Turkish by Elif Ersavci, is being published by Kolektif next week.

Nikolai Duffy brilliantly reviews Exodus at The Literateur.

Nikolai Duffy brilliantly reviews Exodus at The Literateur.

The great David Winters reviews Exodus for The Independent.

The great David Winters reviews Exodus for The Independent.

Fantastic Plastic Mag reviews Magma. By Raul De Tena.

Fantastic Plastic Mag reviews Magma. By Raul De Tena.

The interview with Neil Denny broadcast on his Little Ato...

The interview with Neil Denny broadcast on his Little Atoms show on Resonance FM on 19th April is now available as a Podcast on iTunes.

I'll be interviewed tonight at 9.00PM by Neil Denny on hi...

I'll be interviewed tonight at 9.00PM by Neil Denny on his Little Atoms show on Resonance FM.

A favourite review of Dogma, from Hey Small Press, a publ...

A favourite review of Dogma, from Hey Small Press, a publication that has disappeared from the internet:

Dogma by Lars Iyer
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Publication Date: February 2012
ISBN: 978-1612190464
Paperback, $14.95

The United Kingdom has a Thomas Bernhard, and his name is Lars Iyer. Dogma is the second novel in a trilogy that began with Iyer’s first novel Spurious. It is the story of two Kafka-obsessed windbag British intellectuals, W. and Lars, on a mission to devise and hawk an odd, spartan meta-philosophy they call Dogma. W. is a hardheaded and hyperbolic Jewish professor who spends much of his time devising eloquent ways to insult his colleague Lars, a slovenly and depressed Danish Hindu with an inexplicable obsession with the mysterious Texas blues musician Jandek. The two are unabashedly referential, pulling inspiration from (and speaking constantly of) numerous avant-garde artists and directors: Dogma is a reference to filmmaker Lars Von Trier’s manifesto Dogme95. W. seems to be constantly projecting Werner Herzog’s film Strozsek on a wall in his house. They quote Bataille, Pascal, Leibniz, Rosenzweig, and Cohen. Dogma is hilarious and bleak and loaded with illuminating, brilliant passages, and Iyer’s rapid-fire staccato prose is well-suited to the task. For those who like their dark, difficult books to be funny.