Found this in the proverbial attic, a hard copy review of one of my all-time favourites: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Can't for the life of me recall which publication this ran in and when...!
John Kennedy Toole wrote this aisle-roller in the early Sixties, met with rejection after rejection from publishers everywhere, and eventually committed suicide in sheer despair. Years later, (eleven years, to be precise)his mother got the book into print and still more years later, the book won a Pulitzer (1981) and there has been a radio adaptation of the book, the whole sequence of events standing out as a prime example of tragic irony.
Confederacy... is tightly packed with colourful characters moving at a swift pace, a pace that belies the monstrous bulk of its unlikely hero Ignatius J Reilly. In Reilly you find shades of Oliver Hardy, Don Quixote, Thomas Aquinas, but basically, Reilly is Reilly, incomparably unique, with the strangest sartorial sense and an even stranger worldview; possibly the only hero of modern day literature to simultaneously fascinate and repel the reader.
When his wild-eyes, maroon-haired mother sets the wheel of Fortuna on its downward spin by plunging them into penury and forcing Reilly to lumber out in search of a job, all of New Orleans seems to be up in arms against our man. With the aforementioned worldview that proscribes he must loathe and vociferously fight Protestants, Catholics, gays, heterosexuals, old people, modern people and just about everybody else, what follows isone hilarious prizefight, Reilly vs the World.
In these cycles of confrontations, the reader gets to meet I. Jones, the bartender of the Night of Joy, who speaks Black English like a bard. Sample this: `I think color cats got sweepin, moppin in they blood, it come natural. Like being a vagrant, that too come natural.`
There is Lana Lee the proprietress of the Night of Joy whose extracurricular activities are of considerable interest to both Jones and the New Orleans Police Department. There is Arlene, who makes the most sensational of all floorshow debuts with her moth-eaten cockatoo. There is industrialist Gus Levy who has inherited histextile concern `like a family chamberpot,` and Mrs Gus Levy in perennial search of some cause to espouse. There is Miss Trixie. All she wants is to be left alone. But Mrs Gus Levy decides all Miss Trixie needs is a makeover, and the former has to literally bite the hand that gave her dentures, to disabuse the latter of the idea.
Everything and everyone comes together in a mad melee of a finish. The city of New Orleans has a starring role in the book.
The New York Times called Confederacy... a masterwork of comedy. One feels a sense of loss that we have been deprived of other masterworks from the pen of John Kennedy Toole.
PS: There have been many fruitless attempts to bring the book to celluloid. In an interview some years ago, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh remarked "I think it’s cursed. I’m not prone to superstition, but that project has got bad mojo on it."