Author: John Kennedy Toole
Translator: Seoon-hyeong Kim
Publisher: Domabaem
560 pages | 223*152mm
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>>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
"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."
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic
tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at
home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief
writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who
will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound
Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was
like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing
his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a
halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who
mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his
tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he
knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one
adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than
successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on
their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by
marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented
cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate
attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian
Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and
Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that
weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything
you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in
the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic
and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a
modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility
cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy
beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969
and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he
left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix
Wilber
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