REVIEWS

“A masterpiece of character comedy….The novel can hardly contain burstingly funny Ignatius—and the mix of high and low comedy is almost stroboscopic: brilliant, relentless, delicious, perhaps even classic.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Barrett Whitener strikes just the right note of Rabelaisian iconoclasm. He does justice, not only to each memorably drawn character, but also to the witty, elegant writing.” —AudioFile

“His story bursts with wholly original characters...incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures….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

“A masterwork of comedy…. The novel astonishes with its inventiveness; it lives in the play of its voices. A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.” —New York Times Book Review

“A Confederacy of Dunces has been reviewed almost everywhere, and every reviewer has loved it. For once, everyone is right.”—Rolling Stone

“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.”—Amazon.com Review

JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE (1937-1969), a native of New Orleans, graduated from Tulane University and received a master’s degree in English from Columbia University. He taught at Hunter College, the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and Dominican College in New Orleans.