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.