Book review: A Confederacy of Dunces
A dear friend recommended this book to me, and I have enjoyed it a great deal. It’s not a book I’ll go back to read over and over, like Rendezvous with Rama,(soon to be a major motion picture starring Morgan Freeman) but it is a good book. It has some good laugh out loud moments (well, it did for me) and worth the read.
We start out by learning about Ignatious. He’s a bit odd, but lovable. Well, no, actually, he’s not very lovable. In fact, he’s an annoying gigantic tub of lard. Soon, you want to kill him. Then, you meet his mother, and you sympathise for her plight in having had to raise such a meatsack. At some point Ignatious seems to be masturbating while fantasizing about a family pet. You begin to hate his mother. Other players (including a cop and a stripper) enter the picture, and you start to hate them too. Ignatious needs a job, so he starts to sell hotdogs, at which he is horrible. He then goes to work for a small manufacturer, and you start to like him just because he’s got to put up with ignatious, and his wife is a parboiled pain in the ass, but then, you start to hate him as well. Sooner or later, you hate everyone in the book, so you begin to know how Cliff Yablonski feels. You don’t want to go back and re-read it, not too soon, anyway, because the characters, while extremely well written, annoy you so much.
Do yourself a favor, check out the book at the library. Not worth buying. Shamefully, John Kennedy Toole, who wrote it, never published it, his mother did after he committed suicide. So: if you’ve ever wanted to read a horribly well written book about people you will relish hating, laugh about them on the way, and be tolerably happy to return the book to the library, this is it.
I thought it said “It’s a book I’ll go back to read over and over,” and wondered if you read the same book as me. I liked it, but I read it in 1990 and never re-read it, because I wanted to strangle all of the characters. (I feel the same way about Stephen Donaldson’s books.)
Toole has another book called The Neon Bible that I preferred to this one.
They’ve been talking about filming Dunces for years (Mos Def = Burma Jones), and I think that would actually be better than the book.
Wow: I really did think that I was the only human on earth to have read this book.
of course, I’m often surprised- Mr Porretto remembers (barely) reading “The Way Farer” by Dennis Schmidt (which, frankly, explains a lot).
It won a Pulitzer Prize. But it also has total cult status.
Almost everyone I know’s read it. But opinions vary more widely on it than any other book I’ve ever discussed with anyone. From ‘best book ever,’ to ‘most heinous, pompous, overrated pile of crap ever printed.’
I read this book in the 80’s and again about 5 years ago. Yes, you hate all the characters, but some of the stuff is really funny, especially the hot dog scenes.
Thanks for the blogroll.
I read the book a couple of times. I must sadly report that I recognized some of those characters. Ignatious’ mom could well be any of several old women in my acquaintance.
The whole book is a panoply of people who annoy the hell out of me, and I guess that’s part of why I LIKED the book: it was like picking at a boil…
MC
I got the (unabridged) audiobook from my library.
I gave up before the part where he gets a job; he was so annoying a character that I couldn’t stand listening to him anymore.
Maybe it’s just me – I tend not to like books with unsympathetic protagonists.
I read that book during the late 80s. I remember absolutely nothing about it except the title.