Rating: 
Summary: A Compendium of Kumquats
Review: As the typical Gemini, I understand both the reviews that hate this book & the ones that love it. I hated it for the first 100 pages. Ignatius Reilly is such a self-centered, unattractive character that I wondered why anyone would write a 462 page book about him. And in truth, he doesn't change from the beginning to the end of the book. Is he insane or the classic iconoclast? What Toole does brilliantly in this book is swirl a universe of minor characters and absurd events around Iggy. The minor characters are extremely well defined from the mother to Santa the matchmaker to Dorian Greene the gay blade to Mancuso the addled policeman that we delight in the world that seems to swirl around Ignatius, just outside his much touted "worldview." If you hated this book, you're absolutely right because the main character takes the word "jerk" to a whole new level. If you loved this book, you're also absolutely right because it is a story rich in detail, fresh in its outlook, even several decades after it was written. This is a book that challenges us, tries our patience, and rewards us with a glimpse into the alternate universe known as New Orleans. Good luck!
Rating: 
Summary: A true eccentric (whoa!) and a great romp
Review: A major-grade eccentric character portrayed with richness of detail, an underappreciated American city portrayed with love, and a series of events and interactions that keep you laughing out loud. Celebrate life's absurdity--read this wonderful book!
Rating:
Summary: 10 stars! Must read!
Review: I can't describe enough how much I loved this novel. A brilliant social satire, Confederacy of the Dunces is about a one-man struggle against mediocrity. The novel is intelligent and hilarious. It is intelligently hilarious and hilariously intelligent.Each character is fully established and so vividly described that you can't be indifferent to any of them. How could this author be so good at painting characters through words. For example, the image of the intellectually arrogant Ignatius Reilly has stuck on my mind. He may be fat, slob and ugly but his knowledge of philosophy, to me, warrants his superiority complex. The circumstances behind how the novel got published --the admirable persistence of O'Toole's mother and all ---is itself a moving story. Too bad John Kennedy O'Toole is no longer alive to give us more.
Rating: 
Summary: Most overrated book of the 20th century
Review: For years I have seen this text on recommended-reading lists. I finally read it. What are people thinking? Because of the lack of any character with any redeeming characteristic, this turned into one long tedious reading of a book that starts nowhere and goes nowhere. Due to the lack of any discernable plot, the protagonist of this text remains untransformed by any of the ludicrous slapstick that repeats endlessly like a needle stuck in a record groove. With memorable lines like, "Oh my God!" repeated endlessly (closely followed by the equally side-splitting line, "My valve!") you quickly realize that the author has no clue how to develop the main character into a person with whom a reader could identify. If this isn't bad enough, the book also contains a shallow and mean-spirited depiction of gay sterotypes. Women come off as stupid and whining nags. In short, it is impossible for any intelligent person to sympathise with any of this book's characters. Do not waste your time reading this overrated, fly-blown waste of paper.
Rating:
Summary: Antagonistic Heroes
Review: ~My wife had been nagging me to read this book, but I had been delaying for years. Quite frankly, who would be interested in a book that seems to have replaced the traditional protagonist with an extremely obnoxious antagonist? Finally, I took it with me on an airplane flight--it's the perfect length for such trips. As many of the other reviewers have commented, Ignatius is brilliant. He's the lazy misantropic intellectual in all of us. And, Ignatius is not the only brilliant~~ characterization. By the end of the novel, I found myself cheering for exactly the opposite people of when I started the book. Mr. Levy, the lazy CEO of Levy pants, starts a villian and ends a sympathetic semi-hero, while his wife, the protector of the old company clerk Miss Trixie and proponent of the undertrodden's self esteem, slowly turns from a heroine of the underdog to a self-involved women whose only reason for her ability to torture the poor clerk is her marriage to the CEO. Other~~ characters make similar flips. I enjoyed this book--maybe I'll go start the book again right now. . . .~
Rating:
Summary: Too Close to Home
Review: People from New Orleans who have read this farce either love it or hate it. I think that those who hate it see themselves or a very close relative (Mom?) as one of the crude characters who amuse those of us who know people like those characters, but not closely. We just see them on the streetcar or in the Winn Dixie making groceries. All very amusing. I have read this tale several times and I plan to read it many more. D. H. Holmes is now a Canal Street hotel, but the clock is back (Meetcha under the clock at Holmses) and under it is a life-sized bronze Ignatius J. Reilly worthy of a pilgrimage to New Orleans.
Rating:
Summary: Quite Brilliant
Review: This book is the dogs undercarriage, I laughed so hard my pyloric valve snapped shut. Ignatius is a comic masterpiece and probably the funniest character I have ever encountered. His work for Levy Pants will leave you in stitches. Read this book. If you don't like it, you're obviously a mongoloid.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the most overrated books in history.
Review: Written with style. Toole definitely had talent, but it takes more than vivid descriptions to make a great book. I found the book utterly depressing. It gave me the feeling I get after a David Lynch film, like I need to take a shower. I kept trudging through it because I had heard such good things, but the good things never came. (...) How can so many people love this book so much? I guess the world would be pretty boring if we all agreed on everything.
Rating:
Summary: oh...my...god
Review: This has, hands down, got to be the most hilarious book I've ever read. The way Kennedy has written it makes each scene of the book almost picturesque -- I have a REALLY good idea what all of the characters look like... This is one book that is required reading for all of my friends.
Rating:
Summary: The strange, absurd world of Ignatius J. Reilly
Review: In his book "On Writing", Stephen King's advice to aspiring writers is not to focus so much on plot or theme, but on creating characters that act true to themselves, and the plot will basically write itself. "A Confederacy of Dunces", I believe, does just that. The strength of this book is in its characters, and as they interact, the plot develops in an often hilarious fashion. There are enough "minor" characters to rival the cast of "The Simpsons", and they all have their quirks and eccentricities. There is Mancusco, the disgraced policeman who is forced to patrol wearing absurd costumes and disguises. There is the jive-talking Jones, trying to keep one step ahead of the law by working at sub-minimum wage in a seedy dive. There is Darlene who has the "bright" idea of performing a striptease act with a trained cockatoo, with disastrous results. There is Miss Trixie, a senile secretary still waiting for her Christmas ham. There is the henpecked CEO of Levy Pants, who is content to let the company run itself much to the chagrin of his shrewish wife. These characters and many more populate the universe of this expert novel. The character around which this whole universe revolves is Ignatius J. Reilly. Ignatius cannot fully be described, only experienced. An overweight slob with the vocabulary of an elite snob, Ignatius is at the same time a reactionary and a revolutionary, decidedly out of place in the 20th century, a man with a "unique world view", writing out his manifesto on an endless supply of Big Chief Tablets. Ignatius is usually screaming at almost everything, especially his tippling mother, but also at the dancers on an "American Bandstand"-type show and the actors on the movie screen. His entrance into the job market, as a file clerk who refuses to file and a hot-dog vendor who eats most of the product himself, his botched attempts at political organization, and his obsessive disgust with his "girlfriend" in New York make for a character the likes of which is previously unknown in all of literature. Reviewer have called this a great comic novel, which I feel is shortchanging this book quite a bit. It's a great novel, period.
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