Here is another review of a Pulitzer Prize winning novel I found in my dusty archives.
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES – by John Kennedy Toole (Posthumously published in 1980)
Image via Wikipedia
The laugh out loud novel has always been a thing of mystery to me. Sure, there are funny books (although not as many as people claim) but if you believe all you read you’d think the sight of someone doubled up in blissful agony over a work of fiction would be a regular sight on public transport. A mild hyperventilating wheeze or discreet titter (disguised as one might a burp) I can relate to but not the public guffaw.
Sure, there are funny books but A Confederacy of Dunces is certainly not one of them. Somebody said you’ve got to hear it read in an American voice and recognise the depiction of the seedy lowlife of New Orleans. I remain unconvinced that a Stateside lilt or such background knowledge would enhance its appeal. Surely one of the functions of literature is to transport you to unfamiliar locations. If you need to know the place to understand the references it doesn’t exactly give a novel wide appeal. It would become a ‘local’ book for ‘local’ people.
If you like your (anti) heroes to be lazy, overweight, unhygienic, sexually repressed, badly dressed, then Ignatius J Reilly is your man. To find him, as some have, to be a hilarious comic creation you have to recognise his deplorable condition as symbolic of some deeper malaise, perhaps a reflection of a society which “had once been dedicated to the soul [but] is now dedicated to the sale“. Continue reading
