A Confederacy of Dunces
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- ISBN13: 9780802130204
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has sold over three-quarters of a million copies and continues to earn critical acclaim. The tale of one Ignatius J. Reilly, a “Don Quixote of the French Quarter,” it is a masterpiece of human folly and tragedy.Amazon.com Review
“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into small folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.”
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole’s tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-ancient medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Huge Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. (“Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the gulf.”) But Ignatius’s silent life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is nearly arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso–who mistakes him for a drifter–and then involved in a car manufacturing accident with his tipsy mother behind the veer. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius’s path through the effective world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius likes to despise. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as intricate as anything you’ll find in a Dickens novel, and just as perfectly tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius–selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life–who carries the tale. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. –Alix Wilber
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I read bits and pieces of this book and what i read wasnt excellent. The people in the book are weird with weird thoughts. Whats up with furtuna? Who is that ? Jones is full of himself and doesn’t care about society. He tries to get on a woman on the bus. santa is a ols woman who tries to be young. it wasn’t my type of book.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I’ve heard so much about this book and was able to pick up a copy for 50 cents at a used book sale. I’m glad that’s all I spent; nothing about it engaged me. Ignatius spends so much time playing the victim, he reminds me of people I know in real life and can’t stand. His mother’s no better, clucking and fussing over him when she should be kicking him out of the house. I stopped about a third of the way through chapter 2, they irritated me so much.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I wish I knew how a posthumous book should be edited. As a first novel (excluding the one Toole wrote as a child) it shows enormous creativity and imagination, but I schlepped through the second 200 pages hoping for a change of pace. He showed acute powers of observation — I have known the group of not-so-smart bowling friends in Brooklyn, and I have worked at the long defunct Gloria Gloves in lower Manhattan, with the factory shut off from the office headed by the loyal office manager, the misfit clerk, and the owner impatient to get back to her leisure activity of show dogs, while the business decays from obsolescence and neglect. Burma Jones, the African-American sweeper effective under threat of blackmail, is perhaps only drawn as broadly as the white characters, and he voices truths of life in the 60’s, but he limits on a stereotype. Minkoff, the radical bohemian, exists even today on college campuses and in Soho. Ignatius’s character can probably be establish in the DSM-IV under dependent borderline personality with delusions of grandeur. He is amusing until he’s not so amusing. The factor that keeps Ignatius from being Dickensian is that in Dickens’s works the eccentric people who were amusing had some basic worth, while the evil people were obviously evil. But Ignatius is too destructive — he is parasitic on his mother, he writes a slanderous letter over a forged signature, he wants to lead the factory workers to do physical harm to the office manager, he ruins a desperate stripper’s opening night, and he permanently bites the hands that feed him. Yet, I reflect Toole wants us to like him. Shakespeare shows us that Falstaff is destructive by having the prince reject him in the end. Ignatius’s mother rejects him in the end, when he will stand in the way of her last chance for happiness, but the bohemian girlfriend accepts him, even as he is building her his chauffeur. I would want Toole to save some of the many incidents for a next book. I would also want him to have Ignatius show some growth, but he remains clueless all the way through, although the additional characters grow. I would say this is a excellent book to taste, but it’s not a excellent meal.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The leader of this atrocious book has agreed us the most annoying character in the entire history of literature. Imagine reading the tale of the spoiled small brat kid who lived down the street from you when you were younger. The kid who permanently talked back to his mother and got everything he wanted. Who wants to read about a person like this? The tale itself moves along at a terrible pace. It switches from one unfunny episode to another with a bit of difficulty, usually relying on the main character going home to go to sleep at the end of the chapter, and waking up to a new, irritating adventure.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I have read many books about nothing and loved the majority of them. But, this rambling opus has a poorer center of gravity than its protagonist. The humor is pedestrian at best and the characters, sparsely drawn, wilt in the New Orleans heat. This is just another fine example of how book awards in all-purpose are misguided endorsements of sub-par work. There is a very excellent reason why this book was rejected by various publishers…it isn’t very excellent. Toole casts a very large net, but catches very few fish in his attempt to capture an incendiary and convoluted period in American life. It appears that Toole is building an attempt at clever past fiction, but shrouds the work in ludicrousness in order to hide its fleeting comings and all-purpose failings.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5