A Confederacy of Dunces
Toole, John Kennedy
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BOOK SUMMARY
A madcap satire set in New Orleans, winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.
BOOK SYNOPSIS
"It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragi-comedy is at least made available to a world of readers."
--Walker Percy
When Walker Percy penned these prophetic words in his foreword to the first edition of A Confederacy of Dunces, he could not have known just how wide Toole's "world of readers" would become. Released in April 1980, A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing short of a publishing phenomenon. Turned down by countless publishers and submitted by the author's mother years after his suicide, the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Today there are almost two million copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages.
Toole's lunatic and sage novel introduces one of the most memorable characters in American literature, Ignatius Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubs "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one-- who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age." Ignatius' ire explodes when his mother backs her car into another automobile. The owner of the damaged vehicle insists on payment; Mrs. Reilly demands that her son cease watching television and writing in his Big Chief tablet, and get a job.
Set in New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces outswifts Swift, one of whose essays gives the book its title. As its characters burst into life, they leave the region and literature forever changed by their presences-- Ignatius and his mother; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levy Pants; inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso; Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry; and Jones, the jivecat in spaceage dark glasses. Satire and farce animate A Confederacy of Dunces; tragic awareness ennobles it.
BOOK REVIEWS
"What a delight, what a roaring, rollicking, footstomping wonder this book is. I laughed until my sides ached, and then I laughed on."
--Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun Times
"[This] is, I can say without hesitation, a fantastic novel, a major achievement, a huge comic-satiric-tragic one-of-a-kind rendering of life in New Orleans. "
--Walker Percy
"A masterwork of comedy. . . The novel astonishes with its inventiveness, it lives in the the play of its voices. A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing less than a grand comic fugue."
--New York Times Book Review
"A corker, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book."
--Washington Post
"A Confederacy of Dunces has been reviewed almost everywhere, and every reviewer has loved it. For once, everyone is right."
--Rolling Stone
"A satire of very high order that skewers a place (New Orleans) and a time (the 60s) and all the people shilling therein: the upper and lower class, and all those functionaries of academia and business and authority." --Literal Latt--†â€™Ãƒâ€ ’--¢â‚'ƒâ€šÃ‚©
"A masterpiece of character comedy. . . . The mix of high and low comedy is almost stroboscopic: brilliant, relentless, delicious, and perhaps even classic." --Kirkus Reviews
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0802130208
ISBN(13-digit): 9780802130204
Copyright: 1987
Dewey Decimal: 813/.54
Library of Congress: 87000408
Book Publisher: Pgw
Language: ENG
Binding: Sewn
Paper Weight (lb): 1
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