Rating: 
Summary: It doesn't get much better than this.
Review: This is a true laugh-out-loud book. One of the funniest and cleverest books I've ever read, and in my top five all-time favorites in general. Ignatius taught me how to become an anarchist at my job, too. I was a secretary when I read this book. For several months after I finished it, I would just throw in the garbage various pieces of mail for my coworkers that I deemed to be worthless. A promotion for tickets to the football game? Organized sports is a racket and bad for society. In the trash it went. I loved living vicariously through Ignatius J. Reilly. He is an inspiration is a really twisted way.
Rating:
Summary: A great work and a good laugh
Review: This is the funniest piece of work I've ever really enjoyed. How did some reviewers ever found this book 'boring'??? If you are offended by JK Toole's humour, or don't find it funny at all, you're BORING! to say the least.Even those of you who have read any funny books in your lifetime, can you say honestly that this isn't the funniest you've read?
Rating:
Summary: ya gota love it or hate it
Review: I have a friend who calls this book the litmus test. If someone "gets it," you know they "get it" about life. I can't even tell you how many years ago I read this book, and to this day, if I'm in even the slightest of questionable moods, I can pick it up, fan to any page, and instantly be transported into paroxysms of laughter at the wonderful insanity of this character's insistance on his view of the world, and his unwitting (?) subversion of same. I wonder if it isn't the true test of great literature that it must separate us as 'Confederacy' does. My advice? Try it. If you love it, you are one of us "gifted' (read insane) on this journey. If not, perhaps you have been spared by the more sane of the gods. Either way, enjoy, and may Fortuna be with you! LM
Rating:
Summary: Is tacsat_guru joking?!?!
Review: Obviously, our friend tacsat_guru is an unintelligent, boring person. I'm sorry to say that, I am, but that is my opinion. I have other opinions, ones that seem to match those of the general public. A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the best, funniest and most exciting books I have ever read. I could not put it down. I got this book to read while traveling, and because of that I was in public places as I read. Everywhere I went with this book people gave me strange looks because of the countless times I laughed out loud. I was almost brought to tears on more than one occasion. Not only is the story funny, it has a lot of heart and a deep and poweful meaning and purpose. It is about dreams, aspirations, love, successes, failures, relationships. A Confederacy of Dunces is a spiderweb of captivating characters and situations. It is a MUST READ for anyone who has any sense of taste, humor and appreciation for the subtle beauty of life... unlike our friend tacsat_guru. Oh jeez, I insulted him again. I'm sorry. But he has insulted me with his review of this wonderful book.
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.
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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.
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