Rating: 
Summary: Dull and Insulting
Review: I found this book very bland. I suppose it is supposed to be a humourus book, but I often began to wonder, not knowing anything about the author, if there wasnt more truth than fiction in this book. This has been one of the worst books I have read. I would never recommend this book to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: A Gargantuan Quixote in the sixties Big Easy
Review: There have not been many books that made me laugh out loud so many times during reading as 'a Confederacy of Dunces'. It ranks among the best examples of literary slap stick that I have encountered, and I can hardly imagine anybody not appreciating this tragi-comedy. Toole had a unique gift for intellectualized absurdity and absurdized intellectuality. In addition, he possessed a great sense of style and dialect. Especially the rendition of the accent of the cold-struck New Orleans patrolman Mancuso is a real tour de force. Despite the enormous entertainment I got out of reading this book, I consider 4 stars the most appropriate rating. While the combination of ingredients of the novel is unique, more than obvious resonances from both Rabelais and especially Cervantes echo through this book. While it is unfair to compare the young Toole to two of mankinds greatest comedy writers, it is hard to close ones mind to the parallels between Reilly's Boetius fixation and Don Quichote's dependence on chivalry romances for his worldview. As a consequence I can not help to compare Toole's effort, and the final destination of his novel, to the one that Cervantes accomplished many centuries earlier. Such a comparison can not but highlight the highly skilled superficiality on which 'a Confederacy of Dunces' was built. I hope that cult followers of this book will not be offended too much by this review, because I am certain that Toole could have developed in one of the greatest comedy writers of all time.
Rating: 
Summary: Schizophrenia as salvation
Review: John Kennedy Toole committed a crime against seriousness. His novel is hilarious, though, I think it becomes less hilarious with time because our society is evolving in the direction he showed as being an extreme margin. It is the story of Ignatius Jacques Reilly, an educated scholar who is completely out of joint and out of work in a society that does not want to recognize his value. He is divided between a terroristic mother and an anarchistic girl friend. And we are in New Orleans. There is no room in our society for those marginal intellectuals who see the world as a big boiling pot of normalization, and yet this world is divided in all kinds of pleasure groups. He is revulsed by those pleasures, so he is homophobic, he is misogynistic, he is anti-anything that may appear under the sun and that does not recognize him as a genius. His mother forces him into the working world and every attempt at doing something financially profitable will turn sour because he will only be guided by his desire to transform the world, to make it what he wants it to be. He is neurotic, for sure, but also psychotic but a strange psychosis that makes him commit a constant and repetitive social suicide in the name of his unrecognized genius and personality. Some other characters around him are a lot more hilarious than he is. The undercover cop is pathetic in his attempt to achieve something valuable though he is only able to follow and suffer the trend that would eventually lead him to destruction. Luckily Ignatius is here and leads him to rings of illegal perverts : child pornography, pire violence, etc. There is also a fabulous bourgeois or industrialist who survives from nothing, except his inheritance, but who is salvaged by Ignatius who causes a great crisis with one of his clients. This crisis will lead to pure injustice, though also pure justice : retiring an old senile secretary who accepts to take one of Ignatius' provocations on her shoulders to be retired. But the Levy of Levy Pants finally finds some energy and invents Levy Shorts that will be a success because of his newly-found entrepreneurial energy. The mother is pathetic in her motherly love and her desire to get rid of the weight that her son represents to her. And all that is caused by a grownup teenager who could not grow over his father's death when he was young, and then his dog's death when he was still in high-school. Then he got in connection with another anarchistic mind, a girl, and fell in love with her but the clash between the two anarchism led her to go back to New York, and yet to retain the relation, and yet to come at the last minute and salvage him from internment in a psychiatric hospital. He escapes this cpù^metely destructive environment because and thanks to her. But this book is a deep reflection on society. Our society, in the name of post-modernistic individualism leads to a complete control of individuals provided they stick to their little cubicles and their preformatted attitudes. Then they are aithorized to do all kind of private capers, provided they are completely cut-off from mainstrema diversified normalization. They have to be consciously and willingly schizophrenic to survive in society and have their pleasures in the dark night margins of this society. Such a world is unbearably crazy and this denunciation of post-modernism is an inspiring ray of sunshine in the darkest pit of all. It is this aging and improving of this dramatic analysis of our modern society that makes this book a piece of unforgettable art. But beware ! Do not identify with any character if you do not want to become as crazy as they are, as disruptive as they are and as much of misfits as they are. If you cannot live up to sane schizophrenia, you better leave and go back to your death chamber of an isolating cell. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.
Rating:
Summary: Doesn't live up to the hype
Review: The protagonist is weird, he belches a lot, he loses his job. There. Save yourself ten bucks and move on.
Rating:
Summary: I Read a tattered copy
Review: This became the most popular book in my office about 14 years ago. It was out of print. A very tattered copy was handed from person to person, and after each of us read it it became part of the office lexicon. It had a rubber band around it, and we were cautioned to take good care of this gem. A genius book, that I have just reordered as a gift. Iggy Reilly was, and will be, a riot to those who read this book. I laughed out loud.
Rating:
Summary: The Hilarity , Sadness and tragedy of Bipolar disorder!
Review: John Kennedy Toole suffered and died from Bipolar disorder which is also called Manic Depressive Illness. His main character, Ignatius Reilly is the personification of the disorder of which the author suffers. Ignatius exhibits, in all his hilarity almost all of the symptoms of this dreaded disorder and the author even gives several cries for help through the Ignatius character. Ignatius exhibits constant agitation, fitful sleep, religious psychosis, punning and rhyhming, a constant pressure to keep on talking, severe grandiosity, critisim of others, a ridiculously dated worldview based on his grandiose ideas of how to turn the world in to a place of "taste and decency" through theology and geometry. Ignatius also, in his journals exhibits a type of writing through "clang association" that only people that suffer from mania can accomplish. The book is undoubtedly written so floridly,(another symptom of mania) that I will boldly state that if Toole was not manic, he could have not possibly written such a touching masterpiece. Ignatius, cries for help, I think in the author's behalf. The words manic and depressed are used several times throughout the book. Ignatius cries,"Is my paranoia getting totally out of hand!" The Psyciatric Ward at Charity Hospital is mentioned several times. The description of Ignatius' dreams where he appears on a New York Subway platform as the re-incarnation of Saint James the Less and declares,"Jesus will come to the fore, skins or not!" certainly describes religious psychosis along with the aforementioned clang association. Toole, during his short life, was an instructor at several Universities and Ignatius was even allowed to teach a course in the book although it ended in disater. There are two version of Toole's end. One is that he committed suicide, a symptom of manic depression. In fact, most suicides are caused by people with untreated Bipolar illness. The other story is that they found him dead, long after the fact, in his car in a desolate backwater down south and that he possibly died of manic exhaustion. As a sufferer of Manic Depression, "Dunces" is my Bible. All of my symtoms, including hypersexuality, are exhibited in Ignatius. Unfortunately Ignatius did not re-unite with his beloved Myrna until the very end and he had to resort, sadly to the mastabatory arts. So such a bittersweet book as a reflection of such a bittersweet illness, in all its florid hilarity cannot be missed. I have read this book a dozen times over the years and still find myself breaking out into horselaughter at some of the things stated by the beloved Ignatius Reilly.
Rating: 
Summary: Great characters but ultimately boring
Review: Ummmm, I think I have mixed feelings about this book, and it seems I am one of the few people who neither worship it nor hate it. I really enjoyed the originality of the setting, the bizarre characters and Ignatius Reilly, what a riot! His dialogue is absolutely sharp and hilarious, we have to give credit to the author for this. And Ms. Trixie, ooohhhh!!! My favourite character of the novel, no doubt! But somehow the story lacks a plot, and Ignatius's ramblings become derivative far too early into the book. I'm sure I appreciated the humour and sarcasm in the story, but a better developed plot would have given it five stars.
Rating:
Summary: The Bible of Comedy
Review: "A Confederacy of Dunces" is not even questionably the greatest novel ever written in the realm of comedy. It's not an attempt at greatness, not a shingle thrown at the moon - it's the kind of thing that you read and have this tremendous pang. This sadness that you never get in a book - you know it has to end at some point and that's by far the worst realization. The only bad thing here is that it ends at all. What JK Toole accomplished here is beyond reason. What's worse is that you read it and know the pain he had in not seeing it heralded in every bookstore in his lifetime. Toole's rash and sad decision to end his own life is the best argument against suicide I know of. This man was a genius beyond anything we have now. He lacked the faith and certainty of that. The result is that we were robbed of such a possible body of work that the world will never know. The only close comparison is that of Keats whose "name writ in water" was a tragedy to a literate generation of his time. As gigantic and lush as "Confederacy.." is you never put that aside. That said, this is a Sheherazade of a tale. I suspect that Toole had no idea what he was planning for Ignatius, but that he wrote it as he found it. And what a formula. From the Big Chief tablets to the hot dog cart this is a book that has no equal. It sits in my bathroom rack of books and I just pick it up and read a page and laugh. It's THAT good. Every page is a mystery of writing skill, Toole's characters are vibrant and fully alive always, none resembling the other and they sing when they get going which is immediately. Reading this means you will never be the same. "The Night of Joy" bar will be a place you want to get a drink, Constantinople a word you actually use. More than anything, you'll be lucky. There's not a thing like this book - nothing even close. Oddly I just read Jon Stewart's "Naked Pictures of Famous People" which was heralded on cover and by friends as "hilarious." Please. I don't know how he made a career.... Idiocy in the aught years is heralded as funny. Not likely. Read this book and realize how we have since the late 1950's when this was written, devolved into a true "Confederacy of Dunces". The book means more today than it ever did.
Rating: 
Summary: too long, not funny as hyped to be
Review: Three quarters into the book I wished I hadn't spent the time reading it. It was fatiguing to read the same arguement over and over, nothing new develops about the characters, nothing made me want to finish. I skimmed the last one quarter. Maybe East Coast intellectuals can laugh at the antics of those silly southerners but here in the Northwest I prefer my humor more dry.
Rating:
Summary: Truly funny, with real if unfortunate characters
Review: Truly funny, you will laugh at the situations and odd twists to this story. Easy to read, even if a little choppy at the end. I can appreciate that ending this tale was not easy!
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