A Confederacy of Dunces
Ratings164
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings164
Average rating3.9
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 'My favourite book of all time... it stays with you long after you have read it - for your whole life, in fact' Billy Connolly A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern - this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, noble crusader against a world of dunces. The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged. Ignatius ignores them, heaving his vast bulk through the city's fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him: Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission - and now he has a pirate costume and a hot-dog cart to do it with... Never published during his lifetime, John Kennedy Toole's hilarious satire, A Confederacy of Dunces is a Don Quixote for the modern age, and this Penguin Modern Classics edition includes a foreword by Walker Percy. 'A pungent work of slapstick, satire and intellectual incongruities ... it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue' The New York Times
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Reviews with the most likes.
“Canned food is a perversion...it is ultimately very damaging to the soul.”
The description of the book says “tragic comedy” and that says it all. Not because you feel sad for any of these characters. Kennedy Toole masterfully gives us distance to see what is absurd about them.
Ignatius is both a slob and a snob. A buffoon who behaves so badly to everyone that you're laughing and amazed at the same time at what he tries to get away with. Most of the people reacting to him are not exactly “the straight man” because they are all for the most part onto him, and in some cases perpetuating schemes of their own.
My favorite element is how well all the groups of characters and their storylines converge for a chaotic ending. I love books that can do that and have it be, not exactly believable in the realistic sense, but perfectly fitting for the tone of the book.
Un très bon livre, extrêmement drôle, qui m'a valu plusieurs fou-rires dans mes trajets. Un personnage haut en couleurs, une sorte d'anti héros parfait que l'on ne peut quand même pas s'empêcher d'apprécier un peu. L'écriture est un peu lourde, mais l'histoire est vraiment intéressante, et a une touche d'absurde désopilante, à découvrir à l'occasion ;)
I started to read this before I was planning to visit New Orleans. I got bored with it and went there without finishing the book, then just recently decided to knock the rest of it out. It picked up and was not a slow read, but I still feel like the book was missing something, from what is often hyped as one of the great, most hilarious books of the century. Learning a bit about the origin story is oddly poignant for a book with many fart, burp, and other physical jokes at the expense of its slob lead character, but alas the story about Gottlieb telling him he should revise the work makes me want to side with Gottlieb. The book may have been better if Toole had been able to revise it. And I'd have been interested in his follow up works that were never created.
