A Confederacy of Dunces

Publisher and industry reviews

UK Kirkus review

Toole committed suicide at the age of 32 and never saw this acclaimed novel in print. He wrote it in the early 1960s, but at the time it was rejected by publishers; his mother's unerring faith in its calibre led her to find it an audience in 1980, and in 1981, 12 years after the author's death, it won the Pulitzer Prize. In the vastly fat, bilious, self-important sloth Ignatius J. Reilly, he created an intelligent, repulsive monster, a prophet who speaks of mankind's decline since the Middle Ages, who believes that only with the return of 'theology and geometry' will man's redemption be secured. This is bigger and darker than comedy; in the slapstick of Ignatius's abuse of his body, his mother, and the whole world, in the bitter invective that spews from his mouth against a century gone wrong, and in the diminutive characters that litter his New Orleans, Toole presents a 'commedia' which we are lucky to have. (Kirkus UK)

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