Like a lot of my favorite books, I bought Spurious by Lars Iyer partially due to the cover design – two plastic bags hovering provocatively on the edge of a parking lot (Melville House can really do a good book cover). But, like with all of my favorite books, what was inside the book changed my life. This book (and the rest of the Spurious Trilogy – Exodus and Dogma) oozed a sticky, refreshing style that completely shook me. I quickly became obsessed – with the culmination of the staccato chapters, with the overbearing third-person presence of the shit-talking W., with the unending push behind every idea that propels every image to its bleak, (il)logical extensions. I also loved this book for the unique central characters and their obsessions – two academics in philosophy who acknowledge that “the corpse of the university floats face down in the water”, who are also then “poking it with sticks,” and, of course, who talk unendingly about Kafka and Joy Division.
