Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely horrible
Review: Is it possible to award negative stars??? I just can't understand how/why this book won the Pulitzer, or has any kind of following at all. Why anyone could possibly care about the characters is beyond me. I tried and tried to read it, and finally gave up about 2/3 of the way through. I normally LOVE southern fiction (Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, etc.) and really expected to like this, but it was pretentious, annoying, and most galling of all, amateurish. A total waste of paper, and of time if you actually manage to read the whole thing. Absolutely abysmal.
Rating: 
Summary: Sophisticated, urbane, funny
Review: Probably the funniest book I've ever come across, it, unlike a lot of novels that are humorous, has a great plot and wonderfully defined characters. So many books that are funny are simply small episodes strung together with no real "meat." Not the case with CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. Why it's taken this long for Hollywood to make this into a movie is beyond me (and it's still not done!) Everything is right there--the brilliant dialogue, the great setting of New Orleans, and the star character, Ignatius. But forget about whether or not Hollywood succeeds with their attempt at this Southern classic. After all, they've managed to mangle other works like MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL and a few others. And if they don't do justice to CONFEDERACY they'll certainly be hearing from several generations who have come to love this book. The only bad thing I can say about CONFEDERACY is that you'll never be able to actually own a copy for yourself--you'll be continuously giving away which ever copy you have at the moment, whenever you find someone who hasn't read this magical, entertaining, and rollicking book. It sounds cliche to say "this is a classic," but that's exactly what it is. Also recommended: THE MOVIE GOER, NEON BIBLE, BARK OF THE DOGWOOD
Rating:
Summary: Too Funny
Review: This novel should get more attention in High School reading programs - it will teach a lot about character developement. Additionally, it will teach kids now a days that reading is fun and can be funny. They are making it into a movie which should increase the popularity of this novel. Who will play the main character? I wonder if Oprah will pick it for her classics reading group. I would love to see that show. Can't wait for the movie - should be wickedly funny - if done right.
Rating: 
Summary: A very funny book
Review: The story is quite funny, I often laughed out loud. Some of the parts of the story and a few of the character were not realistic, and the ethnic stereotyping got old, but on the whole I enjoyed this. I listened to the audio version of this book - and the reader was perfect.
Rating:
Summary: The Dunce Meets Reality
Review: This book is truly an intensive study of sociopathology and cross-cultural elements. In addition, Toole depicts the events and characters so humorously and comically, that it is almost impossible not to laugh out loud while reading the book. Sadly, Toole took his own life, when he was unable to find a publisher. However, his mother persevered, found a publisher, and the book won the National Book Award the year it was published. With astonishing brilliance, Toole describes in fairly graphic detail, the basically non-productive life of the protagonist, and the mess he gets himself into, by creating his own little world, which has little relation to the real world around him. Ultimately, he ends up in a true crisis, and is only extricated, by his college friend from Manhattan. This book is truly a piece of comic relief that is timeless in its amusement. It should not be missed.
Rating:
Summary: Unforgetable!
Review: Toole's book is an ambitious work of comedy, highlighted by one of the most memorable literary creations ever, Ignatius J. Reilly. Reilly is an unforgettable character, a self-described anachronism who dresses in a plaid flannel shirt and a green hunter's cap, all the while bemoaning the loss of "taste and decency" in modern times, equating the breakdown of the Medieval system with the ascendancy of chaos and lunacy. He fills notebooks with vitriol detailing his contempt for the regular dregs of society, imbibes and belches up countless bottles of Dr. Nut, and likens his mother to an adolescent floozy. A portly man, he lounges, eats, and farts constantly, his sedentary life interrupted only by a need to find a job. Reilly's escapades as a working man who never works are simply hilarious. His first job is at a pants factory, where he files away papers by throwing them in the garbage, ignores his boss, and befriends an elderly senile employee named Miss Trixie. After being fired for planning an uprising in the warehouse, Reilly finds a job that is perfect for him--pushing a hot dog cart through downtown New Orleans, dressed in a pirate's costume. When his hot dog cart is stolen, Ignatius smartly quips, "The human desire for food and sex is relatively equal. If there are armed rapes, why should there not be armed hot dog thefts?" While the character of Ignatius Reilly is undoubtedly exaggerated and perhaps even absurd, Toole uses Reilly to render his indictment of contemporary society, the novel becoming a vehicle in which hoi polloi are relegated to the role of the dunce, forever confined to a world of indecency. Ignatius is the unconventional hero, tragically confined to the fringes of society. The great tragedy of the novel, however, is author John Kennedy Toole's inability to heed the advice of his own protagonist. In troubling times, Ignatius Reilly, ever devoted to medieval philosophy, would have reminded Toole of Boethius's rota fortunae. Wait long enough and the wheel of fortune will turn your way. Tragically, in his depths of despair, Toole ended his own life, unable to wait for that final turn. Along with this novel, I'd like to recommend another quick Amazon pick: The Losers' Club by Richard Perez
Rating:
Summary: Laugh-out-loud funny with smarts
Review: Word is the Hollywood Suck Machine plans to turn this brilliant book into a movie. I have a little bit more faith in the taste and decency of movie makers since Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy became something that was the opposite of crappiness. Nevertheless, I'm nervous because A Confederacy of Dunces is something, like The Beatles and my Momma, that you DO NOT mess with. This book is ridiculously good on so many levels. Take, for instance, the main character: Ignatius J Reilly is a colossus, a hypochondriac misfit Everyman put upon by a boozy simpleton of a mother and a cast of goofs incapable of understanding his worldview. Not to mention, he's funny as all get out and simultaneously absurd and real. Toole writes this guy so well that you could imagine him waddling into your bedroom, with a storm of stench laced with the scent of stale tea bags trailing behind him. He's a momma's boy in a low-rent New Orleans neighborhood, a homebody who passes harsh judgment rooted in Medieval authoritarianism on crappy pop culture, modern politics and the dupes who surround him. He is plagued by panic attacks, hypochondria, indigestion and the memory of his long-dead dog, whom he remembers more fondly than his late father. Tragic, right? Yes, but somehow John Kennedy Toole was able to turn this sad sack into a hilarious buffoon of a blowhard. If he were real and living in the 2000s, Ignatius would be like one of those nerdy blogger guys who sit at home, fashioning themselves as a know-it-all talk show host, spewing venom and judgment on a world that doesn't hear them. Ignatius is like a lot of dudes you know. He sits around talking about all the big stuff he's doing: Writing a "manifesto" that he thinks could be made into a movie one day, trying to start a political movement, becoming a voice for the great unwashed. But for all his passion, his short attention span and his half-baked attempts to put his big plans into action causes him to constantly defeat himself. AND THAT's JUST ONE CHARACTER! Toole, who was a white dude, does justice to the book's only black protagonist, Burma Jones. Somehow, this uneducated janitor/vagrant comes across as smart and insightful without being a dupe, a clod or what Spike Lee calls "The Super Dooper Magical Negro," the prototypical Hollywood and literary Black character in White stories who saves all the White people with mystical Voodoo insights or all-out magical powers (see most Coen Brothers' movies or Steven King books for examples of this phenomenon). As far as the movie version of A Confederacy of Dunces goes: The rumor is that Philip Seymour Hoffman or Jack Black would play Ignatius. Both would be perfect, but to be believable even these chubbies would need to gain like 75 pounds to do Toole's king fatty justice. Also, Steven Soderbergh is behind the project. He's like the Midas of Hollywood, so as long as he's doing it, it could be done right.
Rating:
Summary: Hysterically Funny
Review: Without a doubt, this might be one of the funniest books I've ever read. The adsurdity of the story challenges our sense of sanity. I will never look at hot dog vendor the same way again. Toole's fine wit needles the fabric of this satrical story so tightly, he leaves us gasping for air.
Rating: 
Summary: Literary Suicide
Review: According to the Forward, by Walker Percy, this young author suicided in 1969. By doing so he missed seeing so many of his perceptions of humanity and social conditions in the US carried to their ultimate logical extreme. Toole was obviously an observant young writer, able to voice opinion well without communicating the underlying bitterness one would expect of a person on the brink of self-homicide. Perhaps Toole intended the characters to be caricatures. If so, he failed. The characters are merely the (not particularly) extremes found in the population pool of the 20th Century US, created and presented to the reader within a plot probably believed to be humorous. Readers might find the humor an uncomfortably realistic portrayal of human flaws. The book is certainly well written. It's an interesting read with excellent characterization, plot, and setting. It's also a book I didn't enjoy reading. Toole's astute awareness of human motivation, stupidity and the direction society was headed was, for me, overshadowed by the fact of his suicide. Toole guessed right about the direction and perceived correctly about many facets of the human condition, then deliberately curtailed his own experience of that life. Reading the book without that knowledge might have made it an enjoyable read. Six decades of life have (for me) confirmed much of what Toole observed about humanity. I suppose what this book lacks is the accompanying joy of having lived what he observed and found a reason for gratitude within that experience. Toole, in my view, might have made a great writer. Maybe he concluded, as Faye Dunaway expressed in a movie Toole saw, "The screwing I'm getting isn't worth the screwing I'm getting." If so, I believe he was wrong. I'd suggest potential readers skip this one and, instead, turn up their zoom lenses on their lives to full magnification. There's no harm in knowing the truths Toole discovered and couldn't live with. But the need for learning them over extended time and within the context of self-recognition, forgiveness and gratitude is punctuated by the fate of this author.
Rating: 
Summary: Dickens he ain't
Review: 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 hobby of show dogs, while the business decays from obsolescence and neglect. Burma Jones, the African-American sweeper working 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 borders on a stereotype. Minkoff, the radical bohemian, exists even today on college campuses and in Soho. Ignatius's character can probably be found in the DSM-IV under dependent borderline personality with delusions of grandeur. He is funny until he's not so funny. The factor that keeps Ignatius from being Dickensian is that in Dickens's works the eccentric people who were funny 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 always bites the hands that feed him. Yet, I think 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 making 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 other characters grow. I would say this is a good book to taste, but it's not a good meal.
| 
