{"id":11212,"date":"2015-10-28T06:32:46","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T13:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=11212"},"modified":"2015-10-28T09:41:05","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T16:41:05","slug":"lit-matters-the-gargantuan-humour-of-john-kennedy-toole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2015\/10\/28\/lit-matters-the-gargantuan-humour-of-john-kennedy-toole\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Matters<\/em>: The gargantuan humour of John Kennedy Toole"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cWhen Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life,\u201d said Ignatius J. Reilly, the fat, slovenly anti-hero of John Kennedy Toole\u2019s A Confederacy of Dunces.<\/i><\/p>\n

Set in mid-century New Orleans, the book features a menagerie of hilarious characters that revolves around the bombastic Reilly. Lover of medieval philosophy and detester of the modern era, Reilly lumbers from one misadventure to another, blowing his mother\u2019s money on movies and hot dogs while writing a \u201clengthy indictment against our century.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book is laugh-out-loud funny, although the slapstick buffoonery tends to polarize readers: you will either love this book or you will hate it.<\/p>\n

It has become a perennial cult classic of the American south: Confederacy<\/i> won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 when it was first published, 12 years after the author\u2019s suicide. It would never have seen the light of day at all if Toole\u2019s mother had not found a badly smeared manuscript after Toole\u2019s death and spent ten years trying to get it published.<\/p>\n

Toole is unsparing in his satire, lampooning everyone and everything: the gay aesthetes of Bourbon Street, black vagrant workers, white-trash neighbourhoods, hotdog vendors, strippers. He didn\u2019t write an earnest indictment of the 20th century (that was, after all, Reilly\u2019s pet project): he wrote a ribald hijinks of an indictment.<\/p>\n

It leaves us with a picture of New Orleans, a city about which so much has been written, that is free of hackneyed stereotypes or sentimentality. His characters are all caricatures, larger than life and spitting their zany southern dialect.<\/p>\n

But Toole\u2019s genius gave them all troubles that we can recognize, character flaws that turn them into people that we feel that we know, perhaps even people who are parts of ourselves.<\/p>\n

John Kennedy Toole must-read:
\n<\/b>A Confederacy of Dunces
\n<\/i>(Public Library Central Branch, Paperback Fiction)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life,\u201d said Ignatius J. Reilly, the fat, slovenly anti-hero of John Kennedy Toole\u2019s A Confederacy of Dunces. Set in mid-century New Orleans, the book features a menagerie of hilarious characters that revolves around the bombastic Reilly. Lover of medieval philosophy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,153],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-october-21-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t