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Loading... A Confederacy of Dunces (original 1980; edition 1987)by John Kennedy Toole (Author)
Work InformationA Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
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I really loved this book, and I'm glad I finally read it. That being said, there were times by the second half when I was AWFULLY tired of Ignatius! But I suppose that's the point. It wasn't a "page-turner" for me. It took me longer than I hoped. Still, satisfying and unpredictable ending, hilarious characters, situations, and dialogue. Great read! ( ) Strange, brilliant, insane and demented, insightful, hilarious, unsettling - all of these adjectives describe John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer-winning A Confederacy of Dunces. Like being drunk at an amusement park, this book kept me off-kilter, and took me on unexpected rides with unforeseen turns, hills, and valleys. Ignatius J. Reilly is, without question, the oddest character I've ever met in fiction in the 55+ years that I've been reading. He's obese, hypochondrical, narcissistic, barbaric, and probably a genius. I never grew to like him as his self-interest was unceasing. The rest of the cast of characters are probably drawn from true life combined with feverish imagination - Reilly's harried mother; his octogenarian co-worker, Miss Trixie; an unsuccessful police officer. I've not been to New Orleans since I was a child, and don't remember much about it, but it certainly came to life on these pages. If it is actually representative of New Orleans, it's a city I'd like to visit and observe. I suspect insanity behind the writing. I know little of John Kennedy Toole, except that he took his own life and never saw his book published, never won the accolades that this book attained, or saw how popular a piece of fiction it became. But I have diagnosed him post-mortem with bipolar disorder (which I share); it would be responsible for the highs of the marvellous burble and whimsy of this book, and the lows which led him to suicide. I didn't love the book, but I did like it very much, and found it grimly amusing. I think I'd have liked it better if I didn't myself feel like a failure, and if I hadn't seen Ignatius J. Reilly's unsuccessful life as a mirror of my own. This strikes me as the sort of book one will only like if one has known the characters in person at some point. Ignatius exists. His mama exists. Mancuso, the Levys, Jones, Santa, Trixie... I've known all of them in some capacity or another. And if you haven't known them, for all their faults, your life is missing something.
1981 John Kennedy Toole La conjuration des imbéciles traduit de l'américain par J.-P. Carasso, Laffont «Drôle de livre, énorme dans la bouffonnerie et la satire, énorme comme son personnage principal, une sorte d'Ubu dévastateur qui lance des anathèmes sur un monde en décomposition.» (Lire, décembre 1981) This is the kind of book one wants to keep quoting from. I could, with keen pleasure, copy all of Jones's dialogue out and then get down to the other characters. Apart from being a fine funny novel (but also comic in the wider sense, like Gargantua or Ulysses), this is a classic compendium of Louisiana speech. What evidently fascinated Toole (a genuine scholar, MA Columbia and so on) about his own town was something that A.J. Liebling noted in his The Earl of Louisiana: the existence of a New Orleans city accent close to the old Al Smith tonality, 'extinct in Manhattan', living alongside a plantation dialect which cried out for accurate recording. El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes más memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatus Reilly -una mezcla de Oliver Hardy delirante, Don Quijote adiposo y santo Tomás de Aquino, perverso, reunidos en una persona-, que a los treinta años aún vive con su estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de teologÃa y geometrÃa como de decencia y buen gusto, un alegado desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve 'catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporánea', embarcándose en empleos y empresas de lo más disparatado. Ruggero Bianchi Tuttolibri settembre 1998 Il caso di Una banda di idioti di John Kennedy Toole ricorda sorprendentemente, per molti versi, quello di Il giovane Holden di J.D. Salinger. Opere, entrambe, di autori (quasi) esordienti e comunque alla loro prima esperienza nel campo della narrativa lunga. E scritte, entrambe, da artisti irrequieti e verosimilmente nevrotici, non disposti a campare sulla sinecura del loro primo successo. Conosciamo tutti, di Salinger, la scelta di centellinare i propri scritti e di difendere la sua scelta esistenziale, una sorte di coleridgiana morte-in-vita. Ma pochi sanno della fine di Toole, nato nel 1937 e suicidatosi nel 1969, a soli trentadue anni, lasciando alla madre il compito di trasformare in bestseller e in classico moderno un libro che forse non pensava di poter mai pubblicare e che, negli Stati Uniti, uscì grazie soltanto al parere autorevole (sebbene segretamente perplesso) del celebre critico Walter Percy, che firma anche l’introduzione all’edizione italiana.Ma le analogie non si fermano qui. Sia Il govane Holden che Una banda di idioti pongono, fin dal titolo, grossi problemi alla bravura dei traduttori. Il primo alludendo, con la dizione originale di The Catcher in the Rye, alle figure del baseball e alle coltivazioni del mais; il secondo chiamando in causa, sotto la formula di A Confederacy of Duncies, la realtà di un Sud "confederato" nella guerra civile e l’indimenticato poema di Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1728), un capolavoro satirico inglese del primo Settecento che nessuno oggi legge come nessuno oggi legge il Parini e, probabilmente, per le stesse ragioni. Come se non bastasse, ai due romanzi è toccata di fatto la medesima sorte in Italia. The Catcher in the Rye di Salinger, uscito nel 1952 nel nostro Paese con il titolo Vita da uomo (Casini editore, traduzione di Jacopo Darca), divenne un bestseller grazie alla nuova edizione di Einaudi del 1961 (trad. di A. Motti). A Confederacy of Duncies passò inosservato dal pubblico una quindicina d’anni fa, sebbene Luciana Bianciardi vincesse, per la sua traduzione oggi ripubblicata in altra cornice, il Premio Monselice 1983. Belongs to Publisher Series10/18, Domaine étranger (2010) Biblioteca Sábado (22) Compactos Anagrama (38) Llibres Anagrama (10) — 6 more Was inspired byAwardsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Humor (Fiction.)
HTML: A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. So enters one of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction. The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pultizer Prizeâ??winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese, self-absorbed, hapless Don Quixote of the French Quarter, whose half-hearted attempts at employment lead to a series of wacky adventures among the lower denizens of New Orleans. This book has become an American comic masterpiece. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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