A Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures."
Stats for nerds
41recommend
76mentions
70people
2008–2026years
59% recommend37% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Some audiobooks can add to the experience - for instance in both Flowers for Algernon and Stranger in a Strange Land the main character evolves in ways the performer encapsulates in their voice that most readers probably did not do as well - I read both in print about 40 years ago and listening to the audiobooks recently was a revelation. There’s also A Confederacy of Dunces - this has multiple American accents that I bet no non native speaker could capture and possibly escapes most Americans as well. Another example is Infinite Jest - some people like the going back and forth with the footnotes but i preferred the audiobook incorporating the footnotes with a second narrator of different gender than the main one with an audio cue.
- >upper-esophageal sphincter dysfunction
If you've never read a Pulitzer Prize Winner, Confederacy of Dunces would be a personally-relatable disaster (to start with; it's great).
>Psychedelics are one of my favorite classes of drug.
Your initial description of usage was probably a bit wreckless, but I do maintain that most people would probably benefit from a single (or few) psilocybin experiences (preferably an initial high-dosage with a well-trained sitter).
Microdosing is a fantastic long-term strategy, before starting more-prescribed methodologies towards happiness. Probably not useful without an initial high-dosage, first (or much cloudier/ineffective).
YMMV £¢¢£
- Same – if you've not yet red Confederacy of Dunces it's as applicable as ever.
The bedsheet protest scene is embarassingly relatable and ... I think my pyloric is aching up again.
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I've only ever started one Pulitzer (non-fiction) that absolutely could not be finished: The Killer Angels (although it was recommended to me by a former soldier who loved it).
- It was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Chief_tablet
This exact product is referenced quite often in John Kennedy Toole’s hilarious A Confederacy of Dunces, set in New Orleans of the early 1960s. The main character, Ignatius J Reilly, is essentially a neckbeard stereotype.
- I think the claim that Buckley's version of Hallelujah is better than Cohen's (even the initial 1984 version) is controversial, at minimum :-)
The observations about obscurity are good ones, however -- A Confederacy of Dunces is a fantastic book, and it's hard to say how many other fantastic works of music, literature, &c. are lost in closets and old laptop hard drives. But I think it's not as much about genius as the author seems to think: given that we don't actually know the denominator under "known great works to unknown great ones," it seems equally plausible to me that "genius" is not the rare or distinguishing thing we always treat it as.
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
