A Confederacy of Dunces

Rating:
Summary: "Dunces" is a MUST-read!
Review: "A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES" is colorful, literary satire of the highest order. Still widely read, the very mention of the title brings a knowing smile to many. How sad that Toole was taken from us by his own tormented hand, how lucky readers are to have this brilliant book to remember him by.

A few years back, when I was working on my novel, "Life Askew," a friend who'd read a few chapters pressed his copy of "Dunces" against my chest and insisted I read it immediately. My book and I were posessed by the spirit of John Kennedy Toole, he'd said. Of course, I was flattered to be compared to a Pulitzer Prize winner, and saddened to learn of the story of how the book was posthumously published by his mother.

Now, years later, my novel is done and I'm convinced my friend was right; "Life Askew" and "Dunces" are cut from the same cloth.

Rating:
Summary: Good book, bad cover
Review: When I read this book, it had a different cover, thankfully. The one pictured here gives away a major scene and pivotal point in the story, which would have greatly annoyed me if I had purchased this one. In the author's defense, he didn't select the cover; he committed suicide many years ago.

The book is good, often humorous, but not to the point that I was laughing aloud very often. The author's language is what made me smile - the character's ridiculous exclamations and dialogue with the TV set while watching TV, his pronouncements and dramatics, and so on.

The characters are strange and unique. The story keeps moving to the end. John Kennedy Toole was obviously a gifted writer. Too bad for everyone that he decided to leave early.

Rating:
Summary: Tragic Till Eulenspiegel
Review: Reading a highly popular, arguably classic, cult favorite with a fresh eye and without preconceptions is not an easy task. I expected Ignatius J. Reilly to leap off the page at me. I wasn't disappointed. On the first page, outside a staid department store in New Orleans, Ignatius in his usual grotesque costume of green hunting camp and too small flannel shirt is awaiting his mother innocently enough until a policeman decides he is a vagrant and tries to arrest him. A crowd is quickly engaged by his steaming objections and loud protestations. Ignatius is at his best when hollering for help. When his weary mother makes an appearance, "Mother!" he called "Not a moment too soon. I've been seized."

We quickly meet friends and denizens not quite on the underside of New Orleans, but leaning that way. Ignatius is a force of nature that needs to be fed, nurtured, and kept on course not only by his long-suffering mother, but any citizen who happens to cross his path. If Ignatius is left to his own devices, he is like a loose pinball, except a pinball never screams for help.

Ignatius, who is the epitome of pseudo independence and ingratitude, actually is fearful of being left alone. When his mother, for the first time in living memory, decides to have a night out, Ignatius is piteous, "I shall probably be misused by some intruder!" he screamed.

For the first third of the book, I was highly indignant at Ignatius: his selfishness, his arrogance and his ingratitude. Gradually, I became fond of him and then fearful for him. He is underscored with tragedy; he has a vision of a world not of his making and it threatens him. Somehow Mr. Toole gathers up all the threads and the end is not chaos as I feared, but everyone seems to get just what they deserve. I was pleased, and I think you will be too.
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: one of the best
Review: I never expected when I began reading this book that I would encounter such a hilarious and original character as Ignatius. He is similar to Shakespeare's Falstaff, always playing, his language always new.

Like Falstaff, Ignatius Reilly is not an admirable character from a moral or social standpoint. On the contrary he seems a pathetic bum, and a burden on his mother. His medieval inclinations set him in constant contrast from the world around him. Does his imagination isolate him from reality? Or does it allow him to make, in his bizarre, idiosyncratic way, a genuine social criticism of American life? Perhaps both at once.

While he is somewhat disgusting, he is also beautifully interesting in his individuality. His sparkling humor is mixed with underlying sorrow and helplessness, and one dreads with him the time when he would be finally trapped by "reality." He is very selfish, but somehow at the same time he is a catalyst for change in the stagnant lives of others.

The end of this book is not what one would expect, ... Personally I think the ending is perfect, and as happy an ending as Ignatius could hope for.

Rating:
Summary: required reading for anyone with a sense of humor
Review: Simply put, Confederacy is an American treasure and quite possibly the funniest book ever written.

Rating:
Summary: very entertaining and touching but not perfect
Review: No need to recap plot as there are over 500 other reviews here for that. I just wanted to throw in my two cents.

"Dunces" is a wild ride through the wacky New Orleans of the early 1960s. The dialogue of certain characters (Jones, Irene, Santa) approaches Twain in its ability to recreate Southern dialect. It's odd though that Ignatius several times disparages Twain as a writer, I wonder what's behind this criticism? Ignatius is a wonderful character, a true misanthropist that others with even a hint of misanthropy in their hearts will take to. I even found myself feeling sorry for the big dope in his isolation from society. The depiction of blacks and gays is so un-PC that it's refreshingly hilarious to read in today's times.

However, the ending was a little disappointing in the way that all of the storylines were wrapped up with a happy outcome. Given the bleak tone of the book, the ending felt false. These characters deserved a more ironic fate. That said, I am still kinda glad that all of the heroes do live happily ever after.

Rating:
Summary: even the title is funny..an absolute gem
Review: I absolutely loved and completely enjoyed this book. If you've heard that this book is funny, it isn't one of those laugh-a-minute books peppered with lame jokes that we've read a dozen times over in other books or heard on televisions' saddest sitcoms. In fact, its a completely different brand of humour. 'This book sure can make me laugh.' For instance, one particular description of our unlikely hero sitting on a stool and looking like a brinjal balanced on a thumbtack made me burst out laughing whilst lining up for the bus. But one cannot attribute all the laughs to Ignatius, but share it amongst every single one of the supporting cast. Not a single word written by John Kennedy Toole was out of place. His juxtaposing of choice words describing the plights in which Ignatius got himself into were works of brilliance. It really is a pity that we will never be able to indulge ourselves in similarly wonderful books again. We have lost a literary genius who managed to convey not just humour, but a deeper meaning concerning human behaviour and thought in his writing. And to think I just picked this book randomly off a shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Everyone I Know Who's Read this Book Has Loved It!
Review: I was astonished to see that anyone has given this book a bad review. It's so funny, I laughed until tears rolled out of my eyes. Fifteen years after I first read it, I still give copies as Christmas presents.

Rating:
Summary: modern classic
Review: I loved this book. My reasons? Too many to get into; besides, others have covered them. A work of genius--and that's exactly what the author John Kennedy Toole was in my humble opinion. Too bad he isn't around to see how many people admire and respect this incredible creation of his. His name lives on in his work. As far as the rare negative response here and there:I say too bad for them, because they just don't get it, the same way some people don't get jazz (the greatest music ever invented). It's their loss. Pick up a copy, or give one to a friend. I had to give it five stars. 'Nuff said, as Stan "The Man" Lee used to say.

Rating:
Summary: Don't believe the hype. Well, believe some of it.
Review: One thing must be made perfectly clear from the start -- this is an extremely fun book to read. It's funny, it's paced well; it's a terrific summer read. That said, however, I don't think this is quite the Great American Novel the critics have declared it to be. My suspicion is that many of them are more excited about HOW it came to be than WHAT it came to be. Just as music critics dream of breaking some obscure-but-magical band they just happened to hear in a small-town bar, this work -- written by a talented-but-troubled young man, forgotten for years after his suicide, discovered by his mother is some musty cabinet, dropped on the desk of a skeptical English professor, begrudgingly read, then found to be a masterpiece -- proved too tempting; it's TOO perfect. So go into this knowing that the book's legacy probably has as much to with its lavish praise as its content.

I found the book to be a bit like a kiddie pool -- colorful, fun, inviting, but, while broad enough to hold many characters, ultimately very shallow. Certainly, many of the characters were given magnificent, hilarious dialogue (although Burma's constant "Hey!"s and "Whoa!"s baffled me; was he being shot at, did he have Tourette's?), but they weren't given much life; we never got to know them. Miss Trixie, Lana Lee and Mrs. Levy, for instance, were given a hook line and esentially repeated it ad nauseum for the rest of the novel. And once the roster was divided into good guys and bad guys, the book marched on to a fairly predictable end.

Even our enormous, over-educated, cripplingly neurotic, eternally belching anti-hero Ignatius was ultimately little more than a vehicle for Toole's amazing monologues. While we were given tiny glimpses of his humanity, an awful high school experience, his heartbreak over his departed dog, his secret love for the movies, we never learned what made him tick. WHY was he so rabidly averse to sex, obsessed with pre-Renaisannce history, undermotivated and fearful? What in his childhood or college experience molded him, changed him?

That said, though, the book IS pretty darned funny and has some of the most twisted twists ever. Ignatius' near-success in organizing a full-blown religious crusade with a pack of bemused, semi-literate factory workers had me rolling, and his, er... unique plan to inflitrate the armed forces to bring about a new era of world peace had to be one of the most hilariously fiendish concepts in recent memory -- it seemed as though it actually MIGHT work. All of the character plots tied together beautifully and, although their eventual outcomes are fairly obvious, the roads which led them there are anything but.

So know that this is not one of the greats, nor is there a Big Message, other than that desperate self-preservation will generally triumph over either secular humanism or staunch religious morality. Know also, though, that you will have a heck of a good time reading this. Perhaps not a leather-bound tome to be positioned among the classics in a college library, but a great addition to the pile of paperbacks in your rented beach house.