Book review - A Confederacy of Dunces

Introduction A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1981, and is the funniest book I have ever read. While I look forward to a book that can dethrone it, it is hard to imagine that such a book could exist. It also has a tragic back story; the book was never published during the life of the writer, John Kennedy Toole, which ended in suicide. His mother eventually managed to get it published, eleven years after his death, an irony entangled with the nature of the work that will not be lost on the reader. Ignatius The central conceit of the novel’s protagonist, Ignatius Jacques Reilly, is already contained in the ironic quote of Jonathan Swift from which the title is drawn: When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. Ignatius is an unemployed medieval history major who lives at home with his mother, doing not very much besides deriding essentially all of modernity (he prefers Boethius);…