Hardcover, 338 pages
English language
Published May 31, 1980 by Louisiana State University Press.
A Confederacy of Dunces
4 stars
(1 review)
"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." So enters one of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction, Ignatius Reilly.
In his foreword to this lunatic and wise novel, Walker Percy dubs Ignatius "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." When his mother backs her car into another automobile and must pay the damages, she insists that Ignatius forego his ritual raging at television, castigating the world on Big Chief tablets, and get a job.
Ignatius' peripatetic employment takes him from Levy Pants, where he leads a workers' …
"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." So enters one of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction, Ignatius Reilly.
In his foreword to this lunatic and wise novel, Walker Percy dubs Ignatius "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." When his mother backs her car into another automobile and must pay the damages, she insists that Ignatius forego his ritual raging at television, castigating the world on Big Chief tablets, and get a job.
Ignatius' peripatetic employment takes him from Levy Pants, where he leads a workers' revolt, to the French Quarter, where he waddles behind a hot dog wagon that serves as his fortress.
A Confederacy of Dunces outswifts Swift, who poem gives the book its title. Set in New Orleans, the novel bursts into life on Canal Street under the clock at D. H. Holmes department store. The characters leave the city and literature forever marked by their presences — Ignatius and his mother; Mrs. Reilly's matchmaking friend, Santa Battaglia; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levy Pants; inept, bemused Patrolman Mancuso; Jones, the jivecat in spaceage dark glasses. Juvenal, Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Swift, Dickens — their spirits are all here. Satire and farce animate A Confederacy of Dunces; tragic awareness ennobles it.
