A Confederacy of Dunces
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces
http://www.curledup.com/dunces.htm
http://www.gradesaver.com/a-confederacy-of-dunces/
by John Kennedy Toole
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kennedy_Toole
What an interesting book. A friend who borrowed the book after I finished it helped me find the words that best described my own feelings - Original, wild, hilarious in parts, brilliant in parts, but… I don’t know… I’ll have to think on it. I certainly enjoyed it though, especially the dialogue and dialects.
Reading it right on the heels of a visit to New Orleans with Ken and Ivy, good friends and former residents of the Big Easy, I enjoyed seeing familiar place names, references to places I had visited, and bits of dialogue that I actually overheard on the streets. The story was intriguing and the characters who peopled the many subplots were so well drawn that I thought I could recognize them should I see them outside the covers of the book. It was laugh out loud funny and thought provoking. As my friend said, ¨I´ll have to think on it.¨
The two things I liked best about the book were 1)Ken gave it to me as a momento of our visit to New Orleans and 2) the origin of the title: a sentence in Jonathan Swift's "Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting":
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
Now, honey chile, ain´t that jest the way of it?
