English (165) French (3) Spanish (1) Swedish (1) Danish (1) Dutch (1) Italian (1) All languages (173)
Showing 1-5 of 165 (next | show all)
|
Loading... A Confederacy of Dunces (Evergreen Book)by John Kennedy Toole
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendations
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Amusing. Feels almost satirical. (  ) crosbyc | Mar 13, 2010 |  This book is, without a doubt, funny. Passages grab like the sharp beak of a bird, forcing out riotous laughter. Be that as it may, the humor is not lowbrow, nor is it stuffy or grandiloquent. it is absurd. The humor is a jagged puzzle comprised of a spiderweb plot stuck full of calamitous happenings, dialogue of the most cosmically silly proportions, and a cast of real "characters", the protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly being the center of this circus. He is indeed a real clown, as educated as he is juvenile, assured as he is fragile, prone to flatulence and ornate logorrhea, and always talking about his damned valve. He is not a likable fellow. Though his exploits are not so readable and entertaining because he is likable, they are so because of the zany reverberations brought about by the impact of this mammoth jester slipping on banana peels. This comic masterpiece is a rare creature of the American cannon, and is a well deserved legacy for its author, who rested in his grave before his opus ever saw the light of day. Had he known the impact that his novel was to have maybe he would have stuck around awhile longer and gifted readers' with another gem. Though one could scarce imagine how he could have ever topped this. (  ) poetontheone | Mar 11, 2010 | I'd rate it less, but one star is the lowest I can achieve here. Definitely not my cup of tea. (  ) GTTexas | Mar 5, 2010 | I know I would probably get lambasted for not giving this 5 stars, but I just didn't think it was the great novel it was described to me. I get that for its time, it was probably groundbreaking in its portrait of New Orleans, but now it just seems dated to me. And I understand the novelty in how the whole thing got published and the author's suicide, but that does not necessarily mean it's a great work of fiction. Maybe I've been bombared by disaffected author's, undermining the American Dream...over and over and over again...to feel the true weight of this book, but it does not carry the timeless quality of so many classic, American novels as hyped. (  ) Willard44 | Mar 3, 2010 | An odd duck of a story, with virtually no plot, but carried almost entirely via the specialized dialogue of the characters. Not for everyone; it's very Sixties, slightly racist and homophobic, and features a protagonist with almost no redeeming qualities. Still, very readable. ( ) conformer | Feb 9, 2010 | 
 A pungent work of slapstick, satire and intellectual incongruities - yet flawed in places by its very virtues. Ultimately, Ignatius is simply too grotesque and loony to be taken for a genius; the world he howls at seems less awful than he does. Pratfalls can pass beyond slapstick only if they echo, and most of the ones in this novel do not. They are terribly funny, though, and if a book's price is measured against the laughs it provokes, A Confederacy of Dunces is the bargain of the year.
References to this work on external resources.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Book description |
|
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:12:49 -0500)
The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details.
Quick Links |
Wikipedia in English (3)
