John Kennedy Toole
1980
Around 400 pages
It's always a bit uncomfy when a novel is published by the family or friends after an author's death, without their permission. We add John Kennedy Toole to our sad list of authors who committed suicide, although I don't think anybody on that list has written anything so comical. It's not my sense of humor, but I still enjoyed the ride, and we never quite reached Gargantua and Pantagruel levels of disgusting jokes.
Ignatius Jacques Reilly is an overweight and unemployed 30-year-old slob who lives with his mother. Due to circumstances that are partly his fault, he has to get a job for the first time in his life. He gets a series of jobs that all end in disaster, Don Quixote-style.
Ignatius comes from a long line of literary losers, which includes Oblomov, Leopold Bloom, and Holden Caulfield. They don't fit in, typically in their outward appearance as well as their private thoughts, which lean towards hate and anger at the world that rejects them. I certainly enjoyed this more than I have enjoyed Joyce, but this isn't a laugh out loud funny novel to me, which I know it is to many.
It's a shame that Toole didn't live long enough to see The Joker.
RATING: ****-
Interesting Facts:
Interesting Facts:
Published 11 years after Toole's death.
The book's title refers to an epigram from Jonathan Swift's essay 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."
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