A Confederacy of Dunces

⚖The case for it

"Read it in public at your own risk," one reader warns, and the warning shows up everywhere: people report "laughing so much that people would ask what was going on" on buses and in waiting rooms. The engine is Ignatius, his operatic tirades against modernity, mass culture, and Mark Twain, arias you reread just for the wording; audiobook listeners add that "the narrator really gave life to Ignatius." Burma Jones runs the sharpest social commentary in the book from behind a broom, at a bar paying him near-slave wages, and New Orleans does the rest, dialect and food and heat. "I laughed from cover to cover," says another.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

"Has there ever been a more annoying, obnoxious character in literature?" one reader asks, because Ignatius never changes, page one to page four hundred, a premise another compresses to "whining is funny, and doing things is bad." The comedy leans hard on the valve, the flatulence, an early bedroom scene involving a dog that functions as an exit door for plenty of readers; one describes getting "lost in all the insults, descriptions of bodily functions, and crude humor." Book clubs split on gender lines, which makes all the awards the book received an unsolved puzzle for those who felt this book was a waste of their time.

— the honest librarian

8h

honest hours

11

sittings