The circumstances of its creation were unorthodox. Toole had to place an academic career on hold when he was drafted into the American army in , and wrote the novel while stationed in Puerto Rico, where he was responsible for teaching English to Spanish recruits. The book was inspired by everything from his life in New Orleans to a professor who he knew, Bob Byrne, whose slovenly and inappropriate habits were considerably removed from the usual expectations of academic rigour.
Like Sherlock Holmes, Byrne wore a deerstalker hat and had a similarly elevated view of his own brilliance; unlike Holmes, Byrne was a flatulent and lecherous buffoon who had firm views on the place of women in society, preferably under his substantial bulk.
When he left the army, he moved in with his parents for a while to complete the book. Unable to find the academic employment that he sought, he became a hot dog vendor for a while, and so Ignatius did too, armed with a cutlass and a superior aspect.
Progressive or right-on, it is not, but that is a large part of its thoroughly disreputable, un-politically correct appeal. His major reason for rejecting it was that, for all of its wit and originality, he remained unconvinced that it had any particular point. He began to lose faith in Dunces , especially after the highly regarded local author Hodding Carter Jnr, in whose patronage he had placed inordinate hopes, showed little but polite contempt for it.
He continued his academic career without enthusiasm, and then, after a descent into paranoia and mental instability, gassed himself in his car in March , while on a road trip. If that was the end of the story, it would be a happy one, but instead there is a curious sequel, namely the never-ending attempts to see it filmed.
Of that reading I can recall only a vivid, tingling antipathy, akin to walking into a party and realizing instantly that you want to leave.
The book, which has become a classic of Southern literature and a mainstay on college syllabi, is entertaining—by any metric, the work of a hugely promising young writer.
Toole would almost certainly have published better novels had he been given the opportunity to write them. Still, as I settled into the book again, twenty-three years later, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
Although they argue constantly, they never do anything so banal as change their minds. Early in the novel, Ignatius stands outside a department store with his mother while a dim-witted police officer named Mancuso attempts to arrest him:.
When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip. This confrontation sets the novel in motion, for, shortly after Ignatius and Irene make their escape, Irene smashes her car into a building, causes a thousand dollars in damage, and forces Ignatius to go to work to help pay off her debts. The first places him in the front office of Levy Pants, a fading clothing factory; the second has him selling—or, rather, refusing to sell—hot dogs.
He starts at Levy Pants, where he agitates the Black factory workers into joining a so-called Crusade for Moorish Dignity, before trying, and failing, to turn it into a riot.
These antics, so jarring to modern sensibilities, can nevertheless be hilarious. The Levy Pants sequence especially is a comedic tour de force.
In this, it achieves a curious distinction: a novel that might have been considerably more fun to write than it is to read. The first print run was only 2, copies, so a first edition of the book is relatively rare. Citation Accession :. Have you read widely in Boethius? Denizen: "Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda.
Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman. The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions.
Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful.
Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate. Jul 12, Madeleine rated it liked it Shelves: head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book , , blogophilia , tooting-my-own-muted-horn , books-with-buttons , our-libeary , maybe-it-s-time-to-live.
ETA: I recently came across a physical copy of this at my favorite used-book store. The eagerness with which I grabbed said copy--and the disappointment I felt in its previous owner for the lack of annotation I found in its pages--suggests that I liked this book far more than I hated its main character.
Also, I am gleefully drunk at this particular moment so please forgive me for any logical or grammatical inconsistencies currently present in this preface. I might get around to fixing them once ETA: I recently came across a physical copy of this at my favorite used-book store. I might get around to fixing them once sobriety returns to me.
I've come to realize that, for me, a mere "liked it" is usually the most apologetic rating. A three-star rating is my literary equivalent of "It's not you, it's me," an embarrassed concession that I'm the real problem here. It's usually an unspoken understanding that I can recognize why a work is so universally lauded but that it just didn't tickle me the way it ought to have.
Sometimes it's simply a matter of taste, sometimes it's just bad timing, sometimes it's me having a visceral reaction to a work of fiction that shouldn't get under my skin so deeply. My three stars do not do this book justice, I realize that: They do, however, reflect just how torturous it was for me to watch Ignatius Reilly not get the thorough comeuppance or righteous bitch-slap that both hands of Fortuna owed such a thundering manchild.
So I always thought this was written by a contemporary of Jonathan Swift's. Maybe it's because of the title. Maybe it's because Toole is the first person since Swift who could make satire purr like a satisfied lap cat. Maybe it's because this is a novel packed with odious vermin of the highest order. Whatever the cause for my wildly mistaken notion, I don't remember what set me straight, nor do I recall why gaining such corrective insight propelled me on a frantic mission to both own and read this book as soon as humanly possible: All I am certain of is that the urge to get my hands on "Confederacy of Dunces" was impossible to put off 'til later, which is my preferred approach to doing almost anything.
But every paper-and-ink copy I found had a cover that I absolutely hated and now that I know the character, I'm annoyed that Ignatius looks more like a happy-go-lucky buffoon on many of the cover images when he is, in fact, a detestable, pretentious little wanker who masks his inability to relate to other people with an abrasive, overeducated front.
The solution? Downloading this on my trusty but much-neglected Kindle. It's not that I don't love my Kindle because I do, to an almost psychotic extent. Nor does my bookworm snobbery extend to the assumption that digital books are automatically inferior to their traditional predecessors.
It's just that, after my e-reader became less of a reading device and more of an avenue for proving my Scrabble dominance over that dick AI even though I almost always wind up with more vowels than I think the game really includes, I simply grew accustomed to not using Ruggles the Kindle for his intended nose-in-a-book purpose no, I haven't given all of my gadgets Pynchonian monikers; yes, I do see the irony in naming my e-reader after an author who was famously reluctant for his works to be digitalized.
But this isn't about my Kindle: This is more about the shiny new iPhone I acquired recently, the very device that signaled another blow to my pseudo-Luddite ways by thrusting me into the joyous world of being owned by a smartphone I'm actually not sure if that was sarcasm, either.
Because the first thing I did after shelling out money on yet another Apple product, aside from blowing more than half of my monthly data allotment on downloading selections from my iTunes library before even leaving the Verizon store, was put the Kindle app on my as-of-yet unnamed phone. Seeing as I am, however reluctantly, part of the generation that feels unsettlingly naked without one's phone, my phone goes almost everywhere with me -- and now, so does my Kindle's vast treasury of reading material.
Suddenly, the hatred I felt and still feel for one Ignatius Jacques Reilly grew in all directions, as if it, too, were glutting itself on Paradise Hot Dogs. I hated Ignatius at work. I hated him at home. I hated him in the bathroom. I hated him in bed, on the couch, in other people's cars, while waiting at everything from the grocery store to the dentist's office to the gas station, I hated him in a variety of locations to rival Dr. Seuss's rhyming lists. My burning dislike of the book's main character slipped its tentacles of ire around nearly every facet of my life to the point where I was transferring my irritation to probably undeserving but still irksome strangers.
Reader, I hated him. And it felt bloody freeing, even if I'll never get the closure of punching Ignatius right in his stupid, Vaselined mustache. I'm the kind of person who feels uncomfortable when characters in books or movies are staunchly positioned under a storm cloud of shitty luck and proceed to have misfortune rained upon them to an allegedly humorous effect: Being in a position to shamelessly enjoy every irate former employer's final tongue lashing, to celebrate everyone who peeved Ignatius the way he annoyed the hell out of me Dorian Greene, I think I might actually love you , to snicker at every unflattering description of a character who I loathed made me feel less awful about finally reveling in the seemingly downward trajectory of a character whose downfall I wished I could have on my otherwise itchy conscience.
It was such a nice change to embrace the inevitable onslaught of woe that came rushing at a story's main character for once. But Ignatius even ruined that for me, as his titanic girth is buoyed by an ego that just won't quit. What willful refusal to accept responsibility! What blissful ignorance of one's own flaws! What enthusiastic defiance of reality! The mental gymnastics required in tirelessly painting oneself as the eternal victim would have impressed me if the character executing such skillful lack of accepting blame for his lot in life weren't such an overgrown brat.
Though it's not like many of the other characters had a whole lot more going for them other than reluctant sympathy and the old adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The duplicitous shrew Lana Lee probably should have been the most detestable member of the cast: While Ignatius is simply too emotionally immature to exist in harmony with the real world, Lana is straight-up starved of all redeeming qualities.
As hard as I tried to sympathize with Irene, Ignatius's poor, long-suffering mother, she was clearly all talk and no action well before the book began, as Ignatius exhibits a lifetime of experience manhandling her into emotional submission -- let this book be a cautionary tale for the long-term damage of passive parenting! As for Mrs. She must have inflicted me with some kind of temporary Tourette's syndrome because I was helpless to squelch the string of profanities that wrenched themselves from my mouth every time she opened hers.
On the other hand, there were some redeeming dramatis personae to be found amidst Toole's merry band of walking character flaws. If Dorian's brief appearance was a breath of fresh air, Jones's presence was the life raft I clung to in a maelstrom of assholery. I might have actually cheered at the end when Officer Mancuso got the kudos he deserved after four-hundred-some pages of being shat on.
I was pretty keen on Mr. Levy until Ignatius dug his teabag-scented claws into him. And, okay, fine: There were actually a lot of folks who I liked simply because they didn't annoy me, like Darlene and Mr. Actually, Darlene's cockatoo might have been one of the most likable characters in the book by virtue of his role in kicking off the climax.
And then there's Myrna, who just might be the most effective foil ever. We hate in others what we hate most about ourselves, and Ignatius love-hates her because they're too much alike in all the wrong ways. Their letters are strokes of narrative brilliance, offering a richly suggested history between the two: I got such a kick out of how Myrna is the only character who gets even a kernel of truth from Ignatius and she assumes that he's exaggerating with every stroke of his pen.
I probably would have liked her less had she been more of an active force here, so I'll be happy with how stingy Toole was with her scenes. This should, by all rights, be at least a four-star novel. It's Toole's fault that he was too adept at creating characters that embody so much of what disgusts me in real people. Feb 24, Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it really liked it Shelves: exert-yourself , reviews , read , toole. You know how dogs sometimes sniff each other for ages before deciding to hump?
I was like that for a few years before I read the book, but more importantly I sniffed around ineffectually for the first pages and could easily have blamed the book for my lack of engagement. I read the last pages in a couple of sittings.
I had to get on a roll. But once you commit, the book pulls you, rather than you having to push the book. In the beginning, I was afraid that it was going to be like a bowl of two kilos of green jelly that was just too rich or disgusting to finish.
Instead, I felt it was just the right amount. So, some reactions. Style I thought "Confederacy" was very much like a zany TV sitcom. There was minimal description of scene and action. However, the dialogue was consistently high quality and very, very funny. You do want to write down some of the lines, so that you can use them on your friends, but secretly you know that you'll never get into a situation where they'd be equally appropriate or funny.
You just have to recommend the book to the right person. However, when I realised that Toole was a slim, neat, tidy English teacher, quite unlike the obese Ignatius, I started to imagine Toole reading extracts from the book in class. Apparently, he was really popular with his students. I could just imagine the sense of privilege hearing him reading from "Confederacy". I can imagine the fits of laughter his students would have had as they heard some of the sentences and expressions emerge from his mouth.
I like to imagine Toole alive and vital. Ignatius Reilly Ignatius is a resident of 's New Orleans, the fat kid in school who turns out to be a genius, but has no social graces. I don't recall him reading a book in the novel, but he is obviously well-read. He has constructed his own medieval world-view by which he judges everything and everybody around him. He sees himself as "an avenging sword" in a crusade on behalf of taste and decency, theology and geometry and the cultivation of a Rich Inner Life.
He speaks in a wonderful, bookish formality that really confounds and pisses off everybody around him: "Do you think that I am going to perambulate about in that sinkhole of vice? Astounding Arrogance Ignatius is intellectually arrogant, he judges others harshly, he is removed from reality. He is literally and metaphorically larger than life: "The grandeur of my physique, the complexity of my worldview, the decency and taste implicit in my carriage, the grace with which I function in the mire of today's world - all of these at once confuse and astound Clyde.
There isn't an evil bone in his ample body. But he isn't virtuous as we would normally use the word. He's motivated by the greater good, only he hasn't factored people into the equation. When he ventures into reality for some purpose or other, it inevitably results in chaos and disorder, so there's a sense in which he's an agent of chaos.
Ultimately, I think Ignatius isn't the Messiah, he's just a haughty, naughty boy. Infuences Much has been written about the influences on the novel. This is probably something better left to the individual reader, after you've read the book. Suffice it to say that I probably wasn't conscious of a lot of the influences, other than the obvious references to Boethius' "The Consolations of Philosophy". In one of his more benevolent moments, Ignatius says of "Consolations": "The book teaches us to accept that which we cannot change.
It describes the plight of a just man in an unjust society. He is not content with conformity: "They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food.
The Cloistered Mind Ignatius starts off sloth-like nowadays he would play games and drink copious amounts of Coke all day and all of the night : "I was emulating the poet Milton by spending my youth in seclusion, meditation and study". His college love interest, Myrna Minkoff, is awake up to the fact that he has closed his "mind to both love and society", a "strange medieval mind in its cloister".
Up from the Sloth Ignatius' mother embarrasses and coaxes him into getting a job, which is the beginning of his interaction with the wider world. Ignatius ventures through this subject matter on the way to some sort of climax or revelation at the end of the book. The Importance of Being Earnest On the way, Toole has lots of fun with his subject matter and influences. Ignatius strikes up an alliance with an openly gay character in their political battle: "I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate facade there may be a soul of sorts.
Ignatius is all the more attracted to this scheme, because he knows what effect it will have on Myrna: "The scheme is too breathtaking for the literal, liberal minx mind mired in a claustrophobic clutch of cliches. It starts at a fund-raising party in an apartment, then it goes into the streets of this home of the Mardi Gras, a Carnival-esque city of vice, and then finally to the strip joint, "Night of Joy". Failing to negotiate his way through the debauchery, Ignatius ends up ejected and dejected in the street, where he is almost run over by the reality of a city bus.
Freudian Schleps I don't want to make too much of this point, but I wondered whether the three main characters of "Confederacy" line up like this in terms of Freud's trichotomy: Ignatius: Ego Mother: Super-Ego Myrna: Id. These three aspects of Ignatius' life and personality work their way to some sort of resolution at the end of the book. Whether Freud was a conscious influence or strategy, it is possible that Freud's trichotomy might just be a nice metaphor for the influences on our worldview.
But ultimately he was a romantic at heart, and there is a happy ending. Myrna visits Ignatius with the intention of removing him from the City of Vice and the vice-like grip of his mother. Her solution is to take him to New York, where she has been living. You wonder whether this is just swapping one city of vice for another, but to them New York represents a city of light, possibly of like minds, a cosmopolitan alternative to the conservative southern backwater of New Orleans.
The story ends as they head out on the road. But we know what is in store for Ignatius and Myrna in New York: love and society and, perhaps, just perhaps, lots of sex. Ignatius ends his journey with the most romantic thing he could say to reconcile with Myrna: "To think that I fought your wisdom for years".
Toole's students would have had tears in their eyes. February 24, View all 36 comments. Mar 24, Conrad rated it did not like it Shelves: owned , fiction , abandoned. Most overrated book ever. What a smug pile of overripe garbage.
View all 32 comments. Jul 30, Steve rated it it was ok. To hear some people describe it even people I usually correlate well with , this book is a laugh-scream riot. What I viewed as a miss may have been because the bar was so high. The protagonist or antagonist depending on how you see him is Ignatius J.
Not all guys with yinged-out hair are brilliant physicists either, much as we might surmise. Plenty of people disagree. It was a long time ago that I read it, so factor that in as well. Maybe guys like George Costanza have now gotten me used to whiny, self-centered anti-strivers as sources of humor. I sometimes wonder why certain works are so polarizing. In this case I think lots of people saw a big misanthropic id running roughshod and had to laugh. Others of us were just annoyed.
Do I sound like a terrible curmudgeon right now? I just did a check on my sense of humor and found that it generally goes for sarcasm, irony, and even shtick. View all 60 comments. Feb 13, Lisa rated it it was ok Shelves: pulitzer , books-to-read-before-you-die. Have I lost my sense of humour? Everyone seems to love this piece of writing, and I was highly motivated when I saw the Jonathan Swift quote in the beginning, giving the novel its name: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Slapstick, not irony or Have I lost my sense of humour? Slapstick, not irony or sarcasm, is the method to capture the audience here. Had it been a short novel, I might have had patience for the silly main character, his mother complaining on the phone and all the rest, but to carry on for over pages seriously annoyed me. I have not felt so bored when I was supposed to laugh since I was forced by my younger brothers to watch Dumb and Dumber and Wayne's World in the early nineties.
Over pages, and nothing to quote. There is something between me and the Pulitzers. It just doesn't click, most of the time. I had the time of my life with Beaumarchais yesterday, laughing out loud several times at his play, so maybe my sense of humour is just dated.
View all 46 comments. A relentless belly full of laughs and modern classic of comedy? Probably so. Still, despite the monstrously obese antihero slob Ignatius Jacques Reilly and all his belching, crazy antics, blathering writing damning contemporary society, hot dog scoffing, and nagging dipsomaniac mother - all of which did indeed produce a few chuckles - the Pulitzer winning novel left me with mixed feelings overall.
Because of the tragic back-story of both novel and writer it's a book I so dearly wanted to love, b A relentless belly full of laughs and modern classic of comedy? Because of the tragic back-story of both novel and writer it's a book I so dearly wanted to love, but couldn't. I'm not for one minute singling out A Confederacy of Dunces as the first so-called 'American classic' that didn't get me raving with nothing but high praise, as there has previously been a host of others too.
For me, the best thing about the novel is unquestionably the dialogue - that's where the bulk of the laughs come from - of not just the quixotic Reilly, but the likes of his mother and her sassy friend Santa Battaglia, the vagrant Burma Jones who trying to stay one step ahead of the law, and to a degree some of the workers at the Levy Pants factory where Reilly finds employment for a time before being drawn towards the smell of hot dogs in the fast food vending business.
While it was good to be involved in various side stories from the supporting cast, it is also the novel's biggest fault in my opinion. We have one of the great gargantuan 20th century characters in Ignatius Reilly - a memorable creations in modern literature who is inexplicably educated and scholarly, yet hopelessly detached from reality - and he simply doesn't feature enough. Had he taken up the bulk of the narrative then I just might have scored higher.
When he isn't there, it's just not the same.
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