I won't buy any more books until I've read all the ones I've got", I said to myself. Then I laughed and laughed and laughed ... and I was still laughing when I left Vinnies with another armful of books.
I'd almost succeeded in not buying any more until I saw a Penguin edition of "A Confederacy of Dunces" almost jumping out at me from the shelves. Books being like potato chips to me, I couldn't just take one, and so finished up with half a dozen more (plus a couple of DVDs).
However, I shall start reading John Kennedy Toole's book before any of the others. I had started reading it online but there's really nothing like holding the book in your hands, smelling the paper, turning the pages ...
"A Confederacy of Dunces" is one of the great American cult novels. It was published in 1980, a decade after the suicide of its author, John Kennedy Toole. The hero of the book is the unsavoury figure of Ignatius J. Reilly, a pompous, overweight, flatulent malcontent in a green hunting cap who, at the age of thirty, is still living at home in New Orleans with his drunkard mother. He scorns popular culture; his preferred reading is Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy". Ignatius is a slob who has never been in paid employment. He is devious, arrogant and self-obsessed. Essentially, he suffers from a terrible superiority complex. If Ignatius Jacques Reilly is a self-portrait of John Kenndy Toole, it is a vicious and eviscerating one.
"A Confederacy of Dunces" was made into a movie, as was "The Neon Bible", the author's only other book, written when he was only sixteen years old. So far I've had no luck tracking down either of these movies.
