MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Nietzsche and the Burbs by Lars Iyer
Witty novel on the blank millennial mindset
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
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IN HIS book American Utopia, Fredric Jameson argues that the high-school drama is a utopian genre, depicting a world where all material needs are met and there is no need to work.
It is into this idyllic realm, with its cycle of eternal recurrence, that Lars Iyer releases Friedrich Nietzsche. He lands him in a high school in the sleepy town of Wokingham in the south east of England to preach the consolations of nihilistic philosophy.
Like Iyer's previous fiction, Nietzsche and the Burbs is a novel of ideas. But it departs from his usual university setting to a high school more recognisably rooted in our world rather than the rarefied life of the mind.
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