Have you ever read 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole?

Answer 1

Yes. It's fantastic. Ignatius is one of those rare characters in literature that is so well drawn that it makes me want to reach into the pages of the book and slap him silly. VERY funny stuff, extremely well written.

Answer 2

I have indeed. And it is one of my best-loved books.

Here's a review I agree with completely:

"A MODERN MASTERPIECE, A PROTO-SLACKER, July 10 2000
The story of this book is almost as intriguing as the book's story...read Percy's intro. for all the details.... This is a comic work of the highest order, recalling Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, Chekhov, Greene and other masters of the funny bone. Set in the bohemian and working-class quarters of New Orleans, the novel features Ignatius J. O'Reilly, a grotesque and loveable anti-hero (if such a label is possible). Toole is a brilliant writer, able to draw pathos and humor from the same page. Plot, setting and characterization are all impeccable. If you like stories about obese, stiltedly chivalrous, gluttonous, slothful, idealistic, oft-cruel, vulgar, multisyllabic weenie-vendors, this is undoubtedly your novel of choice."

Click on the second link for another excellent review, please.

Actually, Toole's Mom didn't "take the book to a publisher"; she took it to the great novelist Walker Percy, who read it, thought it was great:

"Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel -- which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first -- is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown from me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.

Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don't want to do. And if ever there was something I didn't want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.

But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained -- that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader make the discovery on his own."

and helped get it published:

"The book was published through the efforts of the writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a revealing foreword) and Toole's mother, quickly becoming a cult classic. Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. It is an important part of the 'modern canon' of Southern literature."

Answer 3

WOAH! YES!!! and it has to be one of the funniest books ever written, and is a fabulous portrayal of the southern-USA race/class system in the 1960s, too. It should be on all school reading lists and then more people might actually come out of the education system loving literature instead of hating it.

Answer 4

an incredible e book. the author dedicated suicide reportedly out of frustration for receiving lots of rejection slips from publishers. After Toole's loss of life, his mom doggedly took his manuscript from writer to writer till somebody agreed to submit it. mockingly, it gained the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

Answer 5

I read it many, many years ago. It actually has a very sad history behind it. The author tried for years to get it published and was repeatedly rejected. He ended up killing himself. After his death, his mother took it to a publisher....and...you guessed it, the book was finally published.

Answer 6

i read it a couple years ago. It's probably one of the funniest books i've ever ready.

Answer 7

no

Answer 8

NO