I’m in the middle of Confederacy and I’m enjoying it, although I’m not exactly burning my way through it. Ignatius is quite a unique protagonist.
As an aside…for anyone who’s seen the movie “Hollywood Knights” with Robert Wuhl, Fran Drescher, etc. (“Volare?”)…is Stuart Pankin’s character Dudley supposed to be based around Ignatius?
What pretentious twaddle.
Although I absolutely do love the book and don’t believe that it’s overhyped generally, I do think that the story of how the book was found and published adds to the allure and maybe causes some people to be less critical.
Perfectly stated, even your opinion on the Levy Pants scenes.
Fair point and I would bet his second novel could have been great. I think some of the hype of this novel is due to the circumstances of its publication. Had he not killed himself, the author probably would have matured into a fine writer.
Interesting. Add several years and I had the same experience, but the other way around.
(I think. You don’t actually say what you thought of HHGttG, but from the context I assume you enjoyed it more.)
Correct. Devoured Hitchhiker’s, then immediately bought the next two books.
Personally I think after he wrote it Toole realized what a pice of shit it was and he then killed himself.
Way over hyped.
One of the depressing things about Confederacy of Dunces (and there are many) is that Ignatius really is just a thinly-veiled depiction of the author. That bumbling, malodorous oaf with no redeeming qualities? Yah, that’s how Toole saw himself.
Actually, just last week I was just having a conversation about this with an older lady that owns an old dusty bookshop in the French Quarter. She ran across Toole’s mother many times over the years and she told me that Mrs. Toole was always very quick to point out, and was quite adamant, that her son was almost nothing at all like Ignatius.
How do you know this?
He was by all accounts considered not to be like Ignatius at all–instead being apparently a very urbane, witty, friendly and intelligent guy.
Why do you think he saw himself otherwise?
According to the Wikipedia page, Ignatius’s slovenliness was based on a colleague of Toole’s.
Here’s an account of him by someone he dated. There are certainly aspects of Reilly in his personality, from the sounds of it, but not the “bumbling, malodorous oaf with no redeeming qualities” part.
Doe this sound like a description of Ignatius?
Yes. That just adds to the hype.
You’ve evidently not read Tinkers.
Does this mean you don’t want my un-dogeared copy, spine still in-tact? Makes a great coaster…
Well, it wasn’t a terrible book, there were parts I did like. The matter of fact accounts of dying from the perspective of an old man whose body is gradually shutting down on him were very good. Nothing, though, can live up to that kind of breathless hype: you go in expecting what P G Wodehouse called “that ‘watcher of the skies when a new planet’ stuff”, and end up bitterly disappointed when it turns out to need a bloody good editor to whack on the head the three page run-on sentence lyrical descriptions of a ditch full of weeds. More dying, less lyrical weeds is all I’m saying. I feel pretty much the same about CoD: pretty funny in parts, a good first effort, next time tidy up the rambling structure a bit and give it a better resolution.
God I hated this book. Handed to me by someone whose taste I had previously trusted 100%, I hated both the plot and the character, and did not find it funny.
I know it’s not necessarily an authoritative source, but this Cracked article has this to say:
So he did have an editor, but I’m not sure if it’s known whether the manuscript his mother was shopping around included the revisions he made for Simon & Schuster, or if it was his actual, original manuscript.
Rather than sympathizing with him, I ended up hating the man. He was Sheldon without a job living with and torturing his enabling mother.
The story was ok. It wasn’t funny but I don’t laugh out loud at many books so I can’t mark it down for that. Essentially it was a character study of a person I grew to despise.