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Summary: Absurd, but fun...
Review: ...I know someone like Ignatius. Some of my friends even say that I am like him. Naw, I'm no genius, nor do I pretend to be. This, my friends, is a good read. It is akin to Savannah's 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' but in New Orleans, with hot dog stand laden street corners with characters too real to be imagined-- pullman/streetcar operators, barkeeps, the homeless, the drugged, the drunk and the old world Orleaners--come to life in this classic overlooked satire. I envy you if you're reading it for the first time!
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Summary: pulitzer prize winning comedy
Review: This is one of my favorite books, and my very favorite comedy. The tale is set in New Orleans, the characters are wonderfully flawed, and the author's style is unique. This novel won the Pulitzer prize for literature in the 1980's. It has a cult following, of which I am a member.
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Summary: Canonize Him.
Review: Toole is the finest, perhaps the only, Catholic writer to survive in 20th-c. America. (O'Connor, who shares some of his southern/Irish anti-intellectual self-hatred, is a Calvinist in all but name.) But of course he did not survive for long.Try to imagine the misery of being a fat, shamed genius sweating it out in the deep South just as the hegemonic smiles of the Kennedy era were beginning their march of conquest. There was no place for Toole under that smile. But he survived long enough to write this hilarious, merciless and heartbreaking novel. All the damned are here and speaking through Ignatius: the fat, the gauche, the gay, the South, the Irish, the working poor, the black...and most fatally of all, the prescient. Because Toole somehow saw all that was to come.Sitting in his room in that fetid backwater, he saw the farce and triumph of the sixties all complete. And he wrote it down with mercy toward none (least of all himself)...and some Peace-Corps fool of an editor stamped NO on it. And Toole died--not so much for our sins, as for the safety of our right to be stupid and smug. And America went on to make hacks, talentless strivers like Mailer and Bellow into heroes, while Toole fed the worms. That's sainthood, isn't it? It seems like sainthood to me. To convert all that horror and shame into something so wonderful, try to give it away, and die.
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Summary: Hilarious!
Review: This is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Anyone who has endured a series of mind-numbingly boring jobs he was vastly over-qualified for will be able to relate to the character of Ignatius Reilly. As a matter of fact, all the characters in the book are enjoyably real and humorous. It is difficult to understand how an author with such a great sense of humor could take his own life.
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Summary: Fortuna! You degenerate wanton!
Review: ...This book means a great deal to me, and every time I read it, I find something new. Hilarious and raunchy, this is one novel you wouldn't expect to find respectable Southern matrons clasping to their bosoms (of course, respectable Southern matrons can be very surprising). Ignatius pretty much speaks for anybody chained to their birthplace and longing for exotic adventure or bygone days in faraway places (North Africa or elsewhere). The best thing is how Toole manages to bring the world outside into the usually provincial world of Southern literature. For example, when I was eleven I knew what a "Mau-Mau" was, the identity of Norman Mailer, and the author of "The Consolation of Philosophy." This book is not only a howler, it's an EDUCATION, and without question the best book ever written about New Orleans (especially if your family, rather than being of pureblood Cajun or Creole stock, is one of those great Irish-German families that are responsible for New Orleans' "reminiscent-of-Hoboken" accent).
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Summary: Humor in tragedy
Review: This was quite possibly the funniest book I have ever read. It was shaped around the star role of Ignatius, but carried a slew of characters who had me bursting with laughter. It is a shame Toole did not stick around a bit longer to grace the literary world with the skill we are so desperately in need of.
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Summary: There's Satire, and Then There's OUCH! This Book
Review: Take one very eccentric city--N'Awlins, the Big Easy. Take some very eccentric characters, everyone from a madame-slash-barkeeper to a beatnik down from New York to some very Confirmed Bachelors to the world's worst stripper. Surround them with the most eccentric of all--Ignatius Reilly, a man by his lights so pure he can't even hold a menial job at the public library because it would cause him to "slop glue all over their best-sellers." You have A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES.There are two levels of satire--the easy, Saturday Night Live type that pokes fun at easy figures like fatuous politicians and hypocritical ministers and then the scathing, down-deep kind that goes after everyone. This book goes after everyone, which is the source of its humor as well as its chief weakness. Jews, cops, lesbians, gay men,widows, bimbos, suburbanites, and so on and so on behave just like their worst stereotypes. If you think this is funny, read the book. If you think this is offensive, leave the book alone. If you stay for the book, you'll be treated to a rollicking, picaresque plot and encounter in Ignatius one of American literature's true originals. For what it is, A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES is first rate.
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Summary: I LOVE my collie
Review: It is the absurdity of a people and their habits and their views and their daily quests to be right that makes this book not just funny but rather touchingly and hauntingly funny. It is a funny that cannot be shaken. Even after you read this book, its characters will replay in yout head. Being from New Orleans, I know the city as a bunch of little cities which make up the greater metropolis, and each of the smaller parts is on a quest to present its part as the only right part. John Kennedy Toole has tapped in to our absurdity in grand style and made me laugh at the way humanity seeks balance by putting the rest of the world on opposite ends of a bizare scale. I wish that John Kennedy Toole were still here to look at our current views and routines and develop new characters to represent each of us; I wish he could still offer us each 12 inches of paradise just as he did in the Quarter while lazily pushing his rolling hot dog cart through the New Orleans humidity. Humans! You gotta' love us! Our ability to scrutinize ourselves and laugh at ourselves is at its finest in this great novel.
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Summary: Hmmmmm...Didn't see too much humor
Review: It was a good book. I'll admit to that. However, I did not find it "rip-roaring". I found it disturbing. It did have funny moments, but I was disappointed, I guess I heard too much hype about its humor. J.K. Toole was a good writer. But I felt this book was unfinished. The last chapter, although climactic seemed to die at the very end. All in all a good, quick read. Interesting characters and story line. Some humor, mostly tragedy and unsetteling reality.
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Summary: AMERICAN DREAM
Review: I loved the book! After reading what everyone else commented on, no one really talked about how Ignatius Reilly was the true way we all should live our lives. We have forgotten the true vision of the American dream, we need to come back to our senses. The American dream isn't about materialistic wealth (look at Ignatius). But he had one thing many of us don't embrace, self-satisfaction. We are caught up in a world of fast cars, beautiful people, and lots of money. We need to remind ourselves that we need to be content with ourselves before anything else. In my opinion, Ignatius is beautiful in his own mysterious ways. JDK
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