A Confederacy of Dunces [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

John Kennedy Toole (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1998

Ignatius J. Reilly is a 30-year-old self-proclaimed genius out to reform the entire 20th century, which doesn't leave him time for an ordinary nine-to-five job. Then one day Mrs. Reilly pushes her reluctant son out of the nest and into the working world of New Orleans--a decision with unforeseeable hilarious results.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."

Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.

Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Oooo-eeee! Toole's outrageous rambling farce comes to life with the wonderful voices of Arte Johnson?surely one of the greatest matches ever of the written to the spoken word. Toole's novel, written in the early 1960s and published posthumously in the early 1980s, is one of the great comic works of the century and still fresh 35 years later. Toole's finest achievement is protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a great intellectual and deadbeat glutton who roams the squalor and charm of New Orleans causing enormous chaos, selling a few hot dogs from his weenie wagon, and suffering a pyloric valve shutdown at the general looniness of the characters he meets in places like the Night of Joy nightclub. Johnson has created a unique voice for each of the many fantastic, overblown crazies woven into this wild story. It's unfortunate that the audio version is abridged. Still, the spirit of the original is here. Highly recommended for all listeners who love a great belly laugh at the human condition.?Barbara Valle, El Paso P.L., TX
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Dove Entertainment Inc; Abridged edition (July 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787117668
• ISBN-13: 978-0787117665
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,116 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,833,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

397 of 421 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Comic Masterpiece, July 17, 2000

By 

J. Mullin (Plantation, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Confederacy of Dunces (Hardcover)

This book is quite simply a comic masterpiece, a novel brimming with original characters, absurd situations, and at its heart a blustery, vulnerable mama's boy named Ignatius J. Reilly. He is one of the most startlingly original characters in modern fiction, and his efforts at hitting the job market after his mother smashes their car will leave you in stitches.

A word on the history of the novel is worth mentioning here. The author, John Kennedy Toole, committed suicide in 1969, and his mother found the hand-written manuscript in her son's papers. She brought them to a publisher, who dreaded having to read even a portion of the work and to notify Toole's mother that it stunk. Instead, he was blown away by Toole's draft, and the rest is history. The novel earned him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, and it is universally hailed by critics.

Trying to summarize the plot is impossible - the book cannot really be categorized. Ignatius is an over-educated oaf who stays home filling his writing tablets full of his offbeat musings on ancient history, which he plans to organize and publish some day but which presently reside all over his bedroom floor. Rome wasn't built in a day he reminds himself. He cites in footnotes, as authority for some of his offbeat opinions, papers he had previously written and hand-delivered to the local university library for inclusion into their archives. He watches dreadful tv shows and movies, howling at the screen with a mixture of delight and loathing at the teenybopper drivel, and in the privacy of his room his self-gratification is performed while imagining visions of the old family dog. And wait til you see him out in public, getting a series of odd jobs, including a filing clerk at Levy Pants (with very innovative filing techniques to avoid crowded file space) as well as a costumed hot dog vendor wandering around the French Quarter in a pirate costume. All the while he begins work on his latest opus, The Journal of the Working Boy.

There is a latent sadness to the plot, for while you are laughing out loud at Ignatius, his bowling-addicted mother, and the motley crew of skillfully drawn supporting characters, you sense that he will never really belong anywhere, and that he realizes his outcast status with his innate intelligence. Perhaps the author felt the same way in 1969, leading to his own suicide.

However, at least Toole did leave us A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel which reveals more with each rereading. Keep it on your shelf, and every now and then pick up the book to any page and marvel at the absurdity of Ignatius's grandiose ramblings, read exerpts of his bizarre historical writings, and revisit his comic efforts to organize a worker's revolt at Levy Pants. The list goes on and on. There is no work of litereature like it I know, and my only regret in reading Toole is the sorrow felt in knowing the tremendous body of work that was lost when he ended his life.

151 of 164 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tragic Till Eulenspiegel, October 10, 2002

By 

sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Confederacy of Dunces (Paperback)

Reading a highly popular, arguably classic, cult favorite with a fresh eye and without preconceptions is not an easy task. I expected Ignatius J. Reilly to leap off the page at me. I wasn't disappointed. On the first page, outside a staid department store in New Orleans, Ignatius in his usual grotesque costume of green hunting camp and too small flannel shirt is awaiting his mother innocently enough until a policeman decides he is a vagrant and tries to arrest him. A crowd is quickly engaged by his steaming objections and loud protestations. Ignatius is at his best when hollering for help. When his weary mother makes an appearance, "Mother!" he called "Not a moment too soon. I've been seized."

We quickly meet friends and denizens not quite on the underside of New Orleans, but leaning that way. Ignatius is a force of nature that needs to be fed, nurtured, and kept on course not only by his long-suffering mother, but any citizen who happens to cross his path. If Ignatius is left to his own devices, he is like a loose pinball, except a pinball never screams for help.

Ignatius, who is the epitome of pseudo independence and ingratitude, actually is fearful of being left alone. When his mother, for the first time in living memory, decides to have a night out, Ignatius is piteous, "I shall probably be misused by some intruder!" he screamed.

For the first third of the book, I was highly indignant at Ignatius: his selfishness, his arrogance and his ingratitude. Gradually, I became fond of him and then fearful for him. He is underscored with tragedy; he has a vision of a world not of his making and it threatens him. Somehow Mr. Toole gathers up all the threads and the end is not chaos as I feared, but everyone seems to get just what they deserve. I was pleased, and I think you will be too.
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

83 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quixote, Bergerac, Schweik, REILLY..., March 17, 2000

By 

Walter V. Cicha "Cichacech" (Vancouver, BC Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Confederacy of Dunces (Paperback)

When I first saw the cover of this paperback in a Georgetown, DC, bookshop a few years ago, I was hesitant to buy it. Simply put, the cover is goofy, and does not do this masterpiece any justice. I am so grateful that I ignored my initial instinct, as I don't remember ever reading a funnier book in the English language than the late John Kennedy Toole's life achievement, nor is there a more memorable character in American literature than I. J. Reilly. The work deserves a 6 star rating! "A Confederacy of Dunces" is more than just incredibly funny, however. It is unusually poignant, gut-wrenchingly sad, and an admirable observation piece on a rather decadent and seemingly lost segment of our society sitting at the mouth of the Mississippi River. I have visited New Orleans three times since 1994 for varied reasons, and the city apparently has not changed in the least since Mr. Toole's late 1960s rendition. His characters continue to stroll and struggle along Bourbon Street and Canal Street, and their troubled spirits infuse every alley and cave of the French Quarter. Just like the district surrounding St. Peter's Square in the city of jazz, Ignatius J. Reilly is out of step with the rest of America. In spite of his repulsive and grossly comical physical presence, he believes in aesthetics and real meaning, in what he perceives to be the truth. For this reason, he is a true literary hero, like Don Quixote, Cyrano de Bergerac and the Good Soldier Schweik before him. One final note: before you buy this book, think about cancelling all your appointments and engagements for the two or three days that follow. They, along with eating and sleeping, undoubtedly will be totally neglected until you finish this 400 page tour de farce.