my weil (lars iyer)

Iyer’s novel is at once maddening and brilliant. It’s a sprawling anti-novel, deliberately resisting plot (although not completely successfully); constantly questioning its own existence, either through the author’s wilful detours or through his characters’ refusal to engage with their apparent narrative journeys. A group of PhD students in Manchester, questioning everything, rebels without a cause, trying to find a way through the jungle of sorrow that is today’s digital modernity. There is gold in them there hills, and Iyer’s text is a feast of thought and philosophy, crammed into the rainy streets of Manchester, where they flaneur around, getting on each others nerves, making each other laugh, getting wasted, playing badminton, even helping each other out. They are a community and we engage with them in a fashion that is, perhaps, disconcertingly orthodox.

I have never read Normal People, worried that it would be like the one episode I caught of the TV series on the plane in January. A kind of pseudo-intellectual bonkfest, masquerading as highbrow. To repeat, I’ve never read the novel, so have no idea whether the episode I saw is anything other than the inevitable betrayal of complex ideas in order to garner ratings. What I can say is I imagine My Weil is the alt-Normal People. A novel that revels in its (pseudo-) intellectualism to such a degree that it wilfully seeks to alienate its readers, to make them want to revolt at the author’s relentless demonstration of his particular brilliance. A novel that, it might even be said, doesn’t want itself to be read. So, of course, I loved it.