A Confederacy of Dunces

By: John Kennedy Toole

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©1980 Thelma D. Toole (P)1997 Blackstone Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Barrett Whitener strikes just the right note." (AudioFile)
"A Confederacy of Dunces has been reviewed almost everywhere, and every reviewer has loved it. For once, everyone is right." (Rolling Stone)
"What a delight, what a roaring, rollicking, footstomping wonder this book is! I laughed until my sides ached, and then I laughed on." (Chicago Sun-Times)

I didn’t understand the point of the book

Maybe I’m too dumb to understand or maybe it was the point of the book to be exceptionally ridiculous. Performance was great by the narrator.

Not my style of writing

Is a slapstick farce a bit over the top and not the type of fiction I enjoy. Never identified to any of the characters.

Excellent

Great read. Intelligent comedic epic. Great audio book to read any time.
Well read. Excellent to read any time

The narrator was great! Great story too…

I enjoyed the dialects and the New Orleans accents of Barrett Whitener very much! I will listen to more works from him, for sure!

Great Book!

I love this book. New Olean's is felt and described perfectly! The writing is brilliant! I've listened to this book several times, and will likely listen to it again.

Nee Orleans classic

This is one of my favorite books and I hadn’t listened to it. Narration was wonderful and he did an excellent job giving voice to the characters. My only criticism is several of the street names were mispronounced. New Orleans pronounces things differently. Prytania, Burgundy, Chartres, Poydras and Tchoupitoulas were mispronounced. Not the narrator’s fault, but it seems if you are publishing a narrator of a book about New Orleans, it is good idea to find out how the locals pronounce things.

One of the funniest books I have read

This book is truly recommended to all who are looking for a genuinely funny book (it won the Pulitzer price after the author had died).

A Perfect Performance, Equal to the Prose

“ ... with the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy.”
- Ignatius J. Reilly

The story of the book and its place in the American canon is well-known. Ignatius J. Reilly is a man of New Orleans and the 13th century. He has been called Don Quixote, but he is the windmill, leaving chaos in a swath larger than his blubbery odious arms.

Two of the books characters are New Orleans and the New Orleans accent. It is the New Orleans of the 1960s, where one twisted wires until the television resolved itself into only two ghostly images, where nickels and dimes could buy things, and when pornography rhymed with photography.

The introduction is by another son of New Orleans, Walker Percy, who tells the story of the novel's publication and praises the authentic dialogue and the portrayal of a black man in the 1960s as a man instead of a charcoal caricature.

Toole's prefaces the novel with a quote from A J Liebling, the great New Yorker contributor, journalist and war reporter. Liebling cites the New Orleans accent--which is not antebellum julip tones but the clipped sounds of a working port, "closer to Hoboken".

Without the right performance, this book fails, and this performance is perfect, from the port city clip to the black man standing up to his racist employer to Ignatius's own blustery indignant quaver.

"Woof!"

Best Naration

This is by far the best Narrated book that I have yet to hear (and I list to a lot). The Author portrays all the many colorful characters brilliantly .

The book itself is well written and funny, however I do find the 30 year old guy living with his mother a little pathetic.

Interesting story... TERRIBLE narration!

With many books, I find I enjoy them more in audio form due to the narration which really brings them to life, i.e. John Lee reading something as epic and expansive as Pillars of the Earth or Simon Vance reading the rather sparse narrative of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In this case, after listening to this book for a little over an hour (painful hour at that) in the car, my husband, who had urged me to download this, said to me "Why don't you stop listening and go ahead and just read the book. I don't want this narrator to turn you off what is essentially a great book."

The main character Ignatious is an overweight, 30 yr old, socially-challenged, pseudo-intellectual, self-important geek and all around idiot. The narrator, however, turns Ignatious into what sounds like a 60 something year old Kentucky Colonel pontificating on his veranda over a mint julep... When not 'doing' caricature voices, his narration is so affected... pronouncing every last syllable and consonant that it sounds absolutely forced and phoney... no one talks like this, why should a story be told like this? This narration has to be one of the worst interpretations of what the writer wanted in the telling of his story. I think Toole is turning over in his grave... Ugh. The worst thing is that I didn't use my credits... rather, I paid extra for this download. And trust me, I'm going to make my husband reimbuse me!