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My Weil
"Memorable characters make this a singular exploration of the human condition." - Publishers Weekly
A scathingly funny look at a group of quirky graduate students majoring in Disaster Studies who are forced to reconsider their cynicism when they confront a new student who, remarkably, has the same name as the 20th Century Catholic mystic philosopher Simone Weil ...
My Weil follows a group of twenty-something PhD students of the new-fangled subject Disaster Studies at an inferior university in Manchester, England, the post-industrial city of so much great music and culture. They’re working class, by turns underconfident and grandiose (especially when they drink) and are reconciled to never finishing their dissertations or finding academic jobs.
Their immediate enemies are the drone-like Business Studies students all around them, as well as the assured and serene PhD students of the posh university up the road. And they’re working together on a film, through which they’re trying to make sense of their lives in Manchester and, in particular, to the Ees, a mysterious patch of countryside that appears to have supernatural qualities.
Into their midst arrives Simone Weil, a PhD student, a version of the twentieth century philosopher, who becomes the unlikely star of their film. Simone is devout, ascetic, intensely serious, and busy with risky charity work with the homeless. Valentine, hustler-philosopher, recognises Simone as a fellow would-be saint. But Gita, Indian posh-girl, is what’s with Simone’s nun-shoes? And Marcie (AKA Den Mom), the leader of the pack, is too busy with her current infatuation, nicknamed Ultimate Destruction Girl, to notice.
The narrator, Johnny, who was brought up in care and is psychologically fragile, and deeply disturbed by the poverty of his adopted city, gradually falls in love in Simone. But will his love be requited? Will Simone be able to save the souls of her new friends and Manchester itself from apocalypse?
A scathingly funny look at a group of quirky graduate students majoring in Disaster Studies who are forced to reconsider their cynicism when they confront a new student who, remarkably, has the same name as the 20th Century Catholic mystic philosopher Simone Weil ...
My Weil follows a group of twenty-something PhD students of the new-fangled subject Disaster Studies at an inferior university in Manchester, England, the post-industrial city of so much great music and culture. They’re working class, by turns underconfident and grandiose (especially when they drink) and are reconciled to never finishing their dissertations or finding academic jobs.
Their immediate enemies are the drone-like Business Studies students all around them, as well as the assured and serene PhD students of the posh university up the road. And they’re working together on a film, through which they’re trying to make sense of their lives in Manchester and, in particular, to the Ees, a mysterious patch of countryside that appears to have supernatural qualities.
Into their midst arrives Simone Weil, a PhD student, a version of the twentieth century philosopher, who becomes the unlikely star of their film. Simone is devout, ascetic, intensely serious, and busy with risky charity work with the homeless. Valentine, hustler-philosopher, recognises Simone as a fellow would-be saint. But Gita, Indian posh-girl, is what’s with Simone’s nun-shoes? And Marcie (AKA Den Mom), the leader of the pack, is too busy with her current infatuation, nicknamed Ultimate Destruction Girl, to notice.
The narrator, Johnny, who was brought up in care and is psychologically fragile, and deeply disturbed by the poverty of his adopted city, gradually falls in love in Simone. But will his love be requited? Will Simone be able to save the souls of her new friends and Manchester itself from apocalypse?
352 pages, Paperback
Published August 29, 2023
14 people are currently reading
2053 people want to read
About the author
Lars Iyer
11 books99 followersLars Iyer is the author of the novel Wittgenstein Jr (2014). He has also written a trilogy of novels – Spurious, Dogma and Exodus. Iyer has also written two scholarly books on the work of Maurice Blanchot. He teaches philosophy at Newcastle University in the UK.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 25, 2024
I think Lars Iyer is back on form; in 2015 I loved Exodus but in 2016 found Wittgenstein Jr disappointing. He has a distinctive writing style, fulsome with hyperbole, and writes within one milieu, the dregs of British philosophy academia. I can't imagine his novels being very rewarding unless you have suffered postgraduate study in the arts, humanities, or social sciences yourself, although I could be wrong. Iyer certainly has the best insight into the PhD experience of any novelist I've come across. I enjoyed My Weil despite and because of the reminders of my PhD years. I finished reading it while procrastinating from proofreading a friend's PhD thesis - which I agreed to do having forgotten how long they are. In the end I managed it by procrastinating from actual work. (My top tip for getting anything done is to find a less appealing alternative.)
My Weil follows a gaggle of philosophy PhD students around Manchester. Early on they adopt a lost soul and name him Business Studies Guy:
I won't lie, those paragraphs were responsible for my selection of Theodor Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity as my next read. There is a piquant combination of irony and sincerity to the whole narrative. Iyer portrays the agonies of doctoral study while glorifying them as an escape from the real world, which is of course worse. His obsession with badminton is odd, but he makes it seem strangely compelling. I found the PhD students and their preoccupations engaging. It was the right choice to make their supervisors absent spectres; in my experience that's how it goes when your project isn't lab-based. I loved the wild liminal space of The Ees, where our doctoral heroes roam in search of magic mushrooms, mysterious ruins, and strange creatures. Not knowing Manchester at all, I'm going to assume this is what it's like. I only know a little about Simone Weil (from Jacqueline Rose's The Plague) and appreciated the student attempting to live her philosophy. Iyer really captures the chaotic dialectic of joy and despair that is perhaps unique to the supremely unstructured PhD lifestyle. My Weil is concerned with the search for meaning amid the apocalypse of later capitalism, yet has a surprisingly happy ending.
My Weil follows a gaggle of philosophy PhD students around Manchester. Early on they adopt a lost soul and name him Business Studies Guy:
You've got a lot to read, Business Studies Guy. You're going to need a whole anti-business deprogramming. A whole de-Business-Studies-ising bibliography.
Read, Business Studies Guy! Read the greats! Climb every mountain! One peak after another, Business Studies Guy! Break your head against Laruelle! Crack your skull on Bergson! You don't know you've read Simondon until you've actually drawn blood!
[...]
The sense of co-discovery! Co-exploration! That no introductory guide could give you, that no Idiot's Guide could convey. Of reading with the book! Beyond it! As thought it continued in us, and we were its true sons, true daughters - its true nonbinary legatees. As though we could continue its writing, stream forwards with it, caught in its flow, propelled by its rhythms...
We've wanted to lower ourselves in obscure oeuvres, like archaeologists into a tomb. We've wanted to be fathoms-deep, among arcane writings. We've wanted to read thinkers half-lost, half-forgotten in the murk. Wanted to tour great thought-systems, consigned to oblivion.
We revisit scholarly disputes no one recalls. Affairs of dust. Abstruse debates, figures, names. We've wanted to scuba dive around the great wrecks of thought. Among great drowned beasts. Through arching thought-skeletons, picked clean by fishes.
We've tasted paradise, Business Studies Guy, and know everything else is bitter. If we seem to hate everything, it's only because we've loved so many things.
I won't lie, those paragraphs were responsible for my selection of Theodor Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity as my next read. There is a piquant combination of irony and sincerity to the whole narrative. Iyer portrays the agonies of doctoral study while glorifying them as an escape from the real world, which is of course worse. His obsession with badminton is odd, but he makes it seem strangely compelling. I found the PhD students and their preoccupations engaging. It was the right choice to make their supervisors absent spectres; in my experience that's how it goes when your project isn't lab-based. I loved the wild liminal space of The Ees, where our doctoral heroes roam in search of magic mushrooms, mysterious ruins, and strange creatures. Not knowing Manchester at all, I'm going to assume this is what it's like. I only know a little about Simone Weil (from Jacqueline Rose's The Plague) and appreciated the student attempting to live her philosophy. Iyer really captures the chaotic dialectic of joy and despair that is perhaps unique to the supremely unstructured PhD lifestyle. My Weil is concerned with the search for meaning amid the apocalypse of later capitalism, yet has a surprisingly happy ending.
October 28, 2023
Another Lars Iyer novel and so therefore another 5* review from me. I really enjoy his dialogue-driven tales of angst and philosophical musings delivered with great verve and humour.
This completes his Philosophers trilogy (following on from Nietzsche and the Burbs and Wittgenstein Jr
He says his next trilogy will be about romance. I'll be very interested to see what he does with that
This completes his Philosophers trilogy (following on from Nietzsche and the Burbs and Wittgenstein Jr
He says his next trilogy will be about romance. I'll be very interested to see what he does with that
September 6, 2023
Kalki baby! This one hit all the right spots in several different registers simultaneously. I finished my PhD some 10 years ago but I still remember that "messianic" time, as Iyer would have it, of being a PhD student. Beautiful and horrifying. On the other hand, I am very in the middle of the "Disaster Studies" academically so all the references are more than familiar, which makes the novel all the more hilarious. I mean, I can't remember when was the last time I roared with laugher while reading. Some favorite quotes:
"Read, Business Studies Guy! Read the greats! Climb every mountain! One peak after another, Business Studies Guy! Break head against Laurelle! Crack your skull on Bergson! You don't know you've read Simondon until you've actually drawn blood!"
And this must be the first time that Laruelle appears in literary fiction, Simondon as well. Another one:
"Tell Gita about our livestock, Valentine says.
Oh yeah - there was this two-headed rat, Marcie says. Like in that James Herbert novel.
It might be hyperintelligent, Valentine says. It might be planning to take over the world.
I think it might be the Man's rat, Marcie says. I think it might be spy for the Man.
We called it Deleuze/Guattari, Valentine says.
We haven't seen it since, Marcie says."
And another one that got me in stiches:
"Another jar. Murkiness. A floating sphere.
Reading the label.
An authentic Derrida testicle, supposedly, Valentine says. There's a lively trade in continental philosophy relics, I hear.
I think Weep make the relics, I say. As an extra source of income.
Well, they made the wrong relic, Marcie says. No one reads Derrida anymore. Now, if it was a Deleuze bollock, that would be different... Or a Meillassoux bollock...
Meillassoux's still alive, idiot, Valentine says.
Which would make it even more valuable, Marcie says."
"Read, Business Studies Guy! Read the greats! Climb every mountain! One peak after another, Business Studies Guy! Break head against Laurelle! Crack your skull on Bergson! You don't know you've read Simondon until you've actually drawn blood!"
And this must be the first time that Laruelle appears in literary fiction, Simondon as well. Another one:
"Tell Gita about our livestock, Valentine says.
Oh yeah - there was this two-headed rat, Marcie says. Like in that James Herbert novel.
It might be hyperintelligent, Valentine says. It might be planning to take over the world.
I think it might be the Man's rat, Marcie says. I think it might be spy for the Man.
We called it Deleuze/Guattari, Valentine says.
We haven't seen it since, Marcie says."
And another one that got me in stiches:
"Another jar. Murkiness. A floating sphere.
Reading the label.
An authentic Derrida testicle, supposedly, Valentine says. There's a lively trade in continental philosophy relics, I hear.
I think Weep make the relics, I say. As an extra source of income.
Well, they made the wrong relic, Marcie says. No one reads Derrida anymore. Now, if it was a Deleuze bollock, that would be different... Or a Meillassoux bollock...
Meillassoux's still alive, idiot, Valentine says.
Which would make it even more valuable, Marcie says."
January 16, 2025
This is a punk parody of grad-school dissertation-writing and academic scholarship. Set in Manchester, at the imaginary All Saint's University, in the recently created Centre for Disaster Studies, the PhD students are all procrastinating layabouts, a self-styled "suicide squad". They spend their days chatting in cafes about seppuku or apophatic theology, getting drunk at the ominously named Ruin bar, masturbating compulsively in their bedrooms, playing violent badminton. Most of the time they are complaining about "artwank", theorizing about the apocalypse, and tediously gossiping about the neighbouring Victoria University, whose students seem to be so much more scholarly, more erudite, and much more boringly traditional. The Disaster PhD students want to write dissertations that end the dissertation, dissertations that consist of contradictions rather than theses, dissertations that transcend writing. They don't really want to write at all. They are in the Center for Disaster Studies and they are the disasters. Their conversations are sharp-tongued and cynical, constant pretentious contumely, with slapdash references to Tarkovsky, J.G. Ballard, Yukio Mishima, Robert Bresson, Georges Bataille. One of the characters has named herself after Simone Weil, identifying with her activism and asexualism. Their dissertations are a patchwork of critical theory and mysticism—topics ranging from religious anarchy, queer communism, the lumpenproletariat, and ritual human sacrifice. Like Ballard's Crash, they seem to get off on their salivating visions of the end of the world.
The word "scholar" derives from the Greek σχολή, meaning "leisure", but came to represent the rarefied ideal of cerebral contemplation and study, as opposed to manual labor and work. In classical Athens, scholarship, the life of the mind, the practice of philosophy, was conceived of as, fundamentally, a form of respite. Aristophanes' Clouds gives the first satire—presenting Socrates as a hammock-bound, naval-gazing huckster, discoursing with comic obtuseness on the nature of the sky. Scholarship has, since its inception, been lampooned as something unproductive, something decadent, something that runs counter to industry and productivity. But Lars Iyer's novel makes the dissertation something of an even more ironic spectacle. The 20th century saw the radical, corporate transformation of the university—objective-driven, outcome-tested, cost-efficient, profit-based and grant-funded. So for these students, procrastination is a deliberate act of protest against corporatized intellectualism. When one of them finds a peer writing her dissertation in her bedroom, he is outraged—writing down words goes against their ethical view of the dissertation. How dare she write when she should be torturing herself with philosophical introspection? They resent Professor Bollocks who makes them attend his morning methods seminar in which he lectures them on milestones, organization and time-management (hasn't he read Heidegger? Berkson? Deleuze? Doesn't he know that the PhD is a pause on time, on the nine-to-five grind, on the traditional career trajectory?) For them, scholarship has nothing to do with "objective-focused study" but more grandiosely with the reinvention (or rather "decreation") of everything. When one of their films wins the local film prize, they leave in protest (don't the judges understand that their film was not a film at all but the destruction of film?) In short, their commitment to academic life doesn't just pit them against capitalism and careerism but against the academy itself. The university has turned "disasters" into another lucrative trend, even selling conference tote-bags to promote disaster studies, but the students spend their time deconstructing the subject into unhinged abstraction and never penning their dissertations.
This is a satire that perversely marries Tarkovsky and Dostoevsky. Like Tarkovsky's Stalker, the PhD students are constantly roaming the outskirts of Manchester, looking (so they say) for some famed room which will grant them whatever they desire. They see the working-class neighbourhoods of Manchester as some alien territory full of curiosities and marvels, a sign already of the end times. Like in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, the speakers are nihilistic pessimists, engaged in long-winded tirades and caustic observations about the world around them. The novel is a pyrotechnic fusillade of literary and cinematic references, a strange collage of Blanchet and Lars von Trier. I'm only surprised that Krasznahorkai and Bolaño don't get a mention.
It's almost unreadable, a narrative that tells the story of graduate students who, for psychological, pathological, and moral reasons, won't write. The Disaster PhD students have made critique their own crucifixion. The deadline is just another disaster that needs to be deconstructed. The novel is an extended polyphony of witty aphorisms, recherché quotations, ruthless taunting, and shroom-induced hallucinations.
The word "scholar" derives from the Greek σχολή, meaning "leisure", but came to represent the rarefied ideal of cerebral contemplation and study, as opposed to manual labor and work. In classical Athens, scholarship, the life of the mind, the practice of philosophy, was conceived of as, fundamentally, a form of respite. Aristophanes' Clouds gives the first satire—presenting Socrates as a hammock-bound, naval-gazing huckster, discoursing with comic obtuseness on the nature of the sky. Scholarship has, since its inception, been lampooned as something unproductive, something decadent, something that runs counter to industry and productivity. But Lars Iyer's novel makes the dissertation something of an even more ironic spectacle. The 20th century saw the radical, corporate transformation of the university—objective-driven, outcome-tested, cost-efficient, profit-based and grant-funded. So for these students, procrastination is a deliberate act of protest against corporatized intellectualism. When one of them finds a peer writing her dissertation in her bedroom, he is outraged—writing down words goes against their ethical view of the dissertation. How dare she write when she should be torturing herself with philosophical introspection? They resent Professor Bollocks who makes them attend his morning methods seminar in which he lectures them on milestones, organization and time-management (hasn't he read Heidegger? Berkson? Deleuze? Doesn't he know that the PhD is a pause on time, on the nine-to-five grind, on the traditional career trajectory?) For them, scholarship has nothing to do with "objective-focused study" but more grandiosely with the reinvention (or rather "decreation") of everything. When one of their films wins the local film prize, they leave in protest (don't the judges understand that their film was not a film at all but the destruction of film?) In short, their commitment to academic life doesn't just pit them against capitalism and careerism but against the academy itself. The university has turned "disasters" into another lucrative trend, even selling conference tote-bags to promote disaster studies, but the students spend their time deconstructing the subject into unhinged abstraction and never penning their dissertations.
This is a satire that perversely marries Tarkovsky and Dostoevsky. Like Tarkovsky's Stalker, the PhD students are constantly roaming the outskirts of Manchester, looking (so they say) for some famed room which will grant them whatever they desire. They see the working-class neighbourhoods of Manchester as some alien territory full of curiosities and marvels, a sign already of the end times. Like in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, the speakers are nihilistic pessimists, engaged in long-winded tirades and caustic observations about the world around them. The novel is a pyrotechnic fusillade of literary and cinematic references, a strange collage of Blanchet and Lars von Trier. I'm only surprised that Krasznahorkai and Bolaño don't get a mention.
It's almost unreadable, a narrative that tells the story of graduate students who, for psychological, pathological, and moral reasons, won't write. The Disaster PhD students have made critique their own crucifixion. The deadline is just another disaster that needs to be deconstructed. The novel is an extended polyphony of witty aphorisms, recherché quotations, ruthless taunting, and shroom-induced hallucinations.
August 27, 2024
i’m excited to get my PhD so i can be as insufferable as these characters
April 3, 2025
always nice to see how a saintlike person behaves in the real world but here i was surprised by how minor a character she was, and all we ended up really hearing about her behavior was that she was always helping the homeless and then it kind of turned into a ya apocalypse novel
was definitely too optimistic of me to go in hoping for for a character like jean valjean or alyosha karamazov or simon costigan, or anything as moving as weil’s actual writings, so maybe the real problem was my expectations
was definitely too optimistic of me to go in hoping for for a character like jean valjean or alyosha karamazov or simon costigan, or anything as moving as weil’s actual writings, so maybe the real problem was my expectations
January 2, 2025
This is one of those rare novels where I say to myself pretty early on — “There’s no way the author can sustain this” — and yet he does. It is also one of those rare novels that, if I were to describe it in terms of character, plot, etc., I’d never pick it up, and yet it’s a wonder, a unique reading experience, a novel of rhythm in terms of both sound and thought. The best way to describe it is as a novel consisting of repeated forms with changing contents. Another way to describe it is as a novel where one has to qualify everything one says about it. It’s this, yes, but that, as well. It’s satirical, but empathic to its targets, and serious without taking itself too seriously, but never really playing the fool. Quietly over the top. And for someone who's not crazy about dialogue in novels, the fact that this novel consists almost totally of dialogue didn't matter; in fact, it was the perfect choice. This novel is the best reason there is to visit Manchester (England, England).
October 30, 2023
You don't need to know much about philosophy to appreciate "My Weil" by Lars Iyer, but it helps. What I don't understand is how a book about PhD students in Manchester UK doesn't once mention "mancunian candidates." Seems so obvious in a black comedy like this one. Also, so many manc musicians are referenced but not one mention of Oasis? Very strange.
I have to admit I had to consult the Internet for some word definitions and background on some of the names dropped. As an example, the characters often visit a strange nature preserve they call the Ees, which I discovered to be a reference to the Earth and Environmental Sciences department at Manchester University. It is also the source of the magic mushrooms they consume regularly. Much of the book is about the characters avoiding work on their doctoral theses and partying just a bit too much. They justify their procrastination by assuming that the world is coming to an end soon anyway. Since they are all in the newly developed Center for Disaster Studies, it is a natural conclusion.
The book is often sardonic with plenty of dark humor. I didn't care for the ending but otherwise recommend it for fans of philosophy, Factory Records and the apocalypse.
I have to admit I had to consult the Internet for some word definitions and background on some of the names dropped. As an example, the characters often visit a strange nature preserve they call the Ees, which I discovered to be a reference to the Earth and Environmental Sciences department at Manchester University. It is also the source of the magic mushrooms they consume regularly. Much of the book is about the characters avoiding work on their doctoral theses and partying just a bit too much. They justify their procrastination by assuming that the world is coming to an end soon anyway. Since they are all in the newly developed Center for Disaster Studies, it is a natural conclusion.
The book is often sardonic with plenty of dark humor. I didn't care for the ending but otherwise recommend it for fans of philosophy, Factory Records and the apocalypse.
Read
December 25, 2023Two short passages from My Weil:
*
We’re more stupid than they are – of course. We’re more idiotic – by necessity. But it’s a massive idiocy. It’s a sky of idiocy, moving. It’s a whole moving sky, alive with the highest, wildest thoughts.
*
Okay, we need a prop… Your character’s carrying a book, den mom, we say. Did anyone bring a book with them?
Valentine, opening his manbag. The Writing of the Disaster: the foundational text of Disaster Studies.
I carry it everywhere, Valentine says. I don’t understand a word.
*
*
We’re more stupid than they are – of course. We’re more idiotic – by necessity. But it’s a massive idiocy. It’s a sky of idiocy, moving. It’s a whole moving sky, alive with the highest, wildest thoughts.
*
Okay, we need a prop… Your character’s carrying a book, den mom, we say. Did anyone bring a book with them?
Valentine, opening his manbag. The Writing of the Disaster: the foundational text of Disaster Studies.
I carry it everywhere, Valentine says. I don’t understand a word.
*
July 24, 2025
Obnoxious far more often than clever, a satire whose conceit wears thin after a few chapters, featuring a barely even one-dimensional Simone Weil stand-in character who exists only as a vehicle for unwanted and uninteresting earnestness and whose air of ennobled martyrdom hardly matches the irl Weil’s bathetic final act. Still liked reading it though bc I’m a sicko for any book about the impossible conditions of contemporary intellectual life… so true…
December 7, 2023
“But by the time the first bombs fell,
we were already bored.
We were already, already bored.”
~ Arcade Fire “Suburbs”
I could not get this lyric from the title track of Arcade Fire’s album Suburbs out of my head while reading the newest Lars Iyer novel, My Weil. This is the story of a group of academics working on their Disaster Studies PhD projects, spend all of the novel doing everything but working on their Disaster Studies PhD projects. The group, who refer to themselves as the Collective, drink pickle backs (whisky with a pickle juice chaser) from bar to bar, play badminton, go to house parties of rich alumni, hang out in a junkyard, and genuinely fear life outside of their little bubble. They live in a dangerous Manchester, go to the second best university, and feel like their entire purpose is to avoid anything outside of their friend group.
At the beginning of the novel, a new member is added to the Collective, one that has changed her name to Simone Weil, after the French philosopher, and is doing her best to live the life that is inspired by Weil’s work. Johnny wants to save her from this and from the dangerous situations that she gets herself into, with the same passion as a character who is trying to save a prostitute from her life of sin. While she is trying to learn compassion and grace by working outside of the friend group, the rest of the group sit around, drink, and talk about philosophy. Most of the group's conclusions and eureka moments really do not add up to much because they are constantly bored with the idea of actually applying themselves to these ideas. The only one who is doing anything close is Simone and Johnny is trying to stop this.
Most of My Weil is interesting and funny. The first half really keeps me wondering where the entire plot is heading, and the last thirty-five pages could honestly be the beginning. At one point Johnny mentions that his PhD project feels like Zeno’s arrow, the closer he gets to the end, the further the end moves away. I feel this immensely in the second half of this novel, and I wonder what would have happened if Lars Iyer started the novel with the last thirty-five pages and built from the end. Overall I know what I was getting when I started Lars Iyer's novel, long passages with deep discussions about philosophy and applying it toward life, but I wish that My Weil was a little more concise.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
we were already bored.
We were already, already bored.”
~ Arcade Fire “Suburbs”
I could not get this lyric from the title track of Arcade Fire’s album Suburbs out of my head while reading the newest Lars Iyer novel, My Weil. This is the story of a group of academics working on their Disaster Studies PhD projects, spend all of the novel doing everything but working on their Disaster Studies PhD projects. The group, who refer to themselves as the Collective, drink pickle backs (whisky with a pickle juice chaser) from bar to bar, play badminton, go to house parties of rich alumni, hang out in a junkyard, and genuinely fear life outside of their little bubble. They live in a dangerous Manchester, go to the second best university, and feel like their entire purpose is to avoid anything outside of their friend group.
At the beginning of the novel, a new member is added to the Collective, one that has changed her name to Simone Weil, after the French philosopher, and is doing her best to live the life that is inspired by Weil’s work. Johnny wants to save her from this and from the dangerous situations that she gets herself into, with the same passion as a character who is trying to save a prostitute from her life of sin. While she is trying to learn compassion and grace by working outside of the friend group, the rest of the group sit around, drink, and talk about philosophy. Most of the group's conclusions and eureka moments really do not add up to much because they are constantly bored with the idea of actually applying themselves to these ideas. The only one who is doing anything close is Simone and Johnny is trying to stop this.
Most of My Weil is interesting and funny. The first half really keeps me wondering where the entire plot is heading, and the last thirty-five pages could honestly be the beginning. At one point Johnny mentions that his PhD project feels like Zeno’s arrow, the closer he gets to the end, the further the end moves away. I feel this immensely in the second half of this novel, and I wonder what would have happened if Lars Iyer started the novel with the last thirty-five pages and built from the end. Overall I know what I was getting when I started Lars Iyer's novel, long passages with deep discussions about philosophy and applying it toward life, but I wish that My Weil was a little more concise.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Read
May 11, 2024“Let me tell you the story of Simone Weil’s rebirth in Manchester.”
With such a premise, I couldn’t not pick this up. I’m only Wikipedia-familiar with Weil’s life and philosophy, but I was curious to see what this book made of the twentieth-century Christian mystic thrown among disillusioned PhD students. The academia-rants in the book (Monday morning method lectures! Business Studies Guy!) would land better those who have been through the wringer of any sort of post grad education, but as for myself, I skimmed them. The conversations among the group of students, and between the students and Simone and Michael (the octogenarian Christian academic who she boards with) were funny and thought-provoking.
If the title grabs you like it did me, I won’t have to tell you to give this book a try.
With such a premise, I couldn’t not pick this up. I’m only Wikipedia-familiar with Weil’s life and philosophy, but I was curious to see what this book made of the twentieth-century Christian mystic thrown among disillusioned PhD students. The academia-rants in the book (Monday morning method lectures! Business Studies Guy!) would land better those who have been through the wringer of any sort of post grad education, but as for myself, I skimmed them. The conversations among the group of students, and between the students and Simone and Michael (the octogenarian Christian academic who she boards with) were funny and thought-provoking.
If the title grabs you like it did me, I won’t have to tell you to give this book a try.
January 19, 2024
Not for everyone, but one of my favorite books of all time. I love the hilarious hyperintellectual theatrically cynical energy of the gang, and the scenes depicting the Simone Weil character are holy.
March 15, 2024
About a group Manchester UK PhD students at the Centre for Disaster Studies. Not the Disaster Studies of FEMA or MPA in Emergency & Disaster Management degree programs. Rather the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Writing of the Disaster’.
October 12, 2023
Good old Lars has done it again. This made me want to watch or re-watch all of Tarkovsky's movies.
January 16, 2024
This book was so fun. It's like Disco Elysium but with grad students.
February 11, 2024
Smart, darkly funny novel about grad students, philosophy, Manchester, and the end of the world.
Read
January 21, 2024This novel is a very Gen Xers / boomer take on millennials. But with some funny and inventive parts too.
There's some good gags- the humanities students and their affinity with badminton, the counterpoint offered by Business Studies Guy, the filleting of humanities philosophers. But Iyer (a bit too in thrall of such philosophers, like his students depicted) keeps writing the same novel.
A) They’re always about millennials who’re constantly competing with each other for the most nihilistic take and
B) The incessant caustic attitude of all these characters fast gets wearing. As their company would in real life.
I get that it's a comedy novel but it’s a bit of an obtuse rendering of a generation fundamentally different in mindset to Iyer’s. He might see them through those eyes on campus but when the characterisation is this thin, so the prose style means we never get to know what anyone looks like, it starts to grate and rely too heavily on clever-clever gags. The characters are empty and nihilistic (Simone is the only interesting one, and given little coverage) and so if they don’t care, why should we?
As if to own the slightest possibility that millennials seem, in Iyer’s eyes, to believe in nothing, there’s the occasional generous gag about baby boomers hoovering up all the property and money before turning the satire rapidly back onto the yoof. But this underestimates millennial anger towards the older generations who've left them in such a fragmented state (anyone remember this much burn out in Lucky Jim? No, they all had free tuition and cheap housing in a world not shattered to bits) and this allows Iyer to own this generational inequality as if it’s a minor detail, just another thing these pesky millennials whine about. This issue then suffuses the text, written about millennials by a Gen X’s / boomer, with a cloying lack of empathy. Some clever philosophical riffs but it all gets very cloying and lumpen very fast when no character is allowed to feel anything for more than an instant, and Iyer never lets them sustain any sincerity which in turn makes it all feel a bit thin. Why can’t the characters be shown feeling something, rather than have them trampling any idea down by each other a moment later? Does Iyer think millennials are to busy whinging to ever have profound moments?
If this is a comedic take on the channel-hopping, internet zapped generation then OK, but really this kind of nihilism was done to death by Bret Easton Ellis, and Martin Amis decades ago did the sense of a decaying metropolitan backdrop signalling the end of times.
For all the admirable comedy and inventive ideas (and the Ee’s is a good one) it does feel a bit like an obtuse portrait of the younger generation. A portrait which negates why the older generation might see the brokenness and cynicism in millennials that they’re seeing. Because the older generation were never particularly empathic about the world they were leaving. So 300 pages of them taking the piss out of the younger generation for a laugh? Nah.
There's some good gags- the humanities students and their affinity with badminton, the counterpoint offered by Business Studies Guy, the filleting of humanities philosophers. But Iyer (a bit too in thrall of such philosophers, like his students depicted) keeps writing the same novel.
A) They’re always about millennials who’re constantly competing with each other for the most nihilistic take and
B) The incessant caustic attitude of all these characters fast gets wearing. As their company would in real life.
I get that it's a comedy novel but it’s a bit of an obtuse rendering of a generation fundamentally different in mindset to Iyer’s. He might see them through those eyes on campus but when the characterisation is this thin, so the prose style means we never get to know what anyone looks like, it starts to grate and rely too heavily on clever-clever gags. The characters are empty and nihilistic (Simone is the only interesting one, and given little coverage) and so if they don’t care, why should we?
As if to own the slightest possibility that millennials seem, in Iyer’s eyes, to believe in nothing, there’s the occasional generous gag about baby boomers hoovering up all the property and money before turning the satire rapidly back onto the yoof. But this underestimates millennial anger towards the older generations who've left them in such a fragmented state (anyone remember this much burn out in Lucky Jim? No, they all had free tuition and cheap housing in a world not shattered to bits) and this allows Iyer to own this generational inequality as if it’s a minor detail, just another thing these pesky millennials whine about. This issue then suffuses the text, written about millennials by a Gen X’s / boomer, with a cloying lack of empathy. Some clever philosophical riffs but it all gets very cloying and lumpen very fast when no character is allowed to feel anything for more than an instant, and Iyer never lets them sustain any sincerity which in turn makes it all feel a bit thin. Why can’t the characters be shown feeling something, rather than have them trampling any idea down by each other a moment later? Does Iyer think millennials are to busy whinging to ever have profound moments?
If this is a comedic take on the channel-hopping, internet zapped generation then OK, but really this kind of nihilism was done to death by Bret Easton Ellis, and Martin Amis decades ago did the sense of a decaying metropolitan backdrop signalling the end of times.
For all the admirable comedy and inventive ideas (and the Ee’s is a good one) it does feel a bit like an obtuse portrait of the younger generation. A portrait which negates why the older generation might see the brokenness and cynicism in millennials that they’re seeing. Because the older generation were never particularly empathic about the world they were leaving. So 300 pages of them taking the piss out of the younger generation for a laugh? Nah.
January 9, 2024
Repetitive and boring. I could never get into it.
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