Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.
So enters one of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction.
The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pultizer Prize–winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese, self-absorbed, hapless Don Quixote of the French Quarter, whose half-hearted attempts at employment lead to a series of wacky adventures among the lower denizens of New Orleans. This book has become an American comic masterpiece.
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"Read this one twice. There is always a new discovery to be had. Ignatius Reilly will go down as one of literature's truly messed-up characters. He is at once awful, pitiful, comical and tragic. I've heard speculation that the author patterned Ignatius after himself. If this story is at all autobiographical, then it would go a distance toward explaining the author's suicide. And the mother? Ugh."
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Kate (4 out of 5 stars)