This is perhaps the most unfair book review I’ve ever written. And because I don’t even like to write book reviews, this post is a hard one to put to proverbial paper. That said, I nevertheless need to get it off my chest — fair or not — so read at your own risk.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole has caused me to do something that I’ve only done on a few rare occasions in my reading past: toss the book out a frozen bathroom window and plunge my head into frigid toilet water.
Over the Christmas break, I signed up for an Audible account and downloaded this book. I’d had it on my “read” list for quite some time, and because it was offered as a free download for new accounts, I decided the time was perfect to join and get a good book. The download did not proceed as smoothly as I would have expected, though this was probably my fault since I was using a new computer (a shiny new Apple iMac), a new operating system (Mac OS X), and attempting to get it to play nicely with iTunes — an exercise in frustration, at best. Still, after a bit of forum perusing and a couple of support emails, I managed to get everything in working order and fired up on my iPhone.
And here’s where the train jumps the tracks.
The narrator of this audiobook, Barrett Whitener, does a fantastic job of “reading” this book. He creates a vivid sense of New Orleans and the colorful, comical characters that inhabit Toole’s fictional French Quarter. Each character has a unique sense of voice, as does the narrators voice, so that you always have a sense of who’s talking to whom as well as when the narrator is simply moving the story along.
And it’s in that sense of voice characterization that lies the unforgivable fault in this audio version of what is essentially a truly remarkable book: the author has got the main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, all wrong.
According to criticism I’ve read, Ignatius is a bit of a doddering curmudgeon; an overweight, low self-monitor sort of man, impossible to suffer and who is still living under his poor mother’s roof — all at the whopping old age of 30. But Whitener’s oral interpretation of Ignatius makes him sound like an irascible old man merely days away from completing his fifth or sixth decade upon this earth. And because so much of what happens in this book is funny only because it happens to a man in early middle-age (as opposed to a man settling into his silver years), an incorrect portrayal simply ruins what has to be an otherwise good read. After all, you don’t win a Pulitzer Prize (as Toole did for this book) without a fine piece of art on which to hang the award.
Strange as it might sound, each of the following are true — simultaneously:
- A Confederacy of Dunces is a very good book and rightfully deserves the moniker “Modern-Day Classic”
- A Confederacy of Dunces is an exceptionally poor audiobook and deserves immediate removal from the store with a full refund owed to its listeners
- The narrator of this audiobook is extremely talented and does a wonderful job of bringing this book to life through the spoken word
- The narrator of this audiobook commits a nearly unforgivable injustice via his portrayal of the main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, so much so that to continue listening feels like an act of betrayal to the memory of the author himself, God rest his soul
It saddens me to think that I may never experience this work as the author had intended. After committing so much time and energy just to cross the halfway point, I bristle at the notion of ever entering this fictional universe again. Though I know it’s unfair, my emotional response to this piece of literature is cast. Much time will need to pass before I could ever entertain the thought of actually “reading” this book.
Sadly, my foray into A Confederacy of Dunces ended in literary tragedy. Perhaps the worst criticism leveled at an author is when a reader stops reading. Illogical as it may be — forgive me Mr. Toole, this debacle was never your fault — sometimes the heart trumps the head.
Who knows. In the end, perhaps this elevates me to the standing of Commander-In-Chief of this particular confederacy.
Sadness is knowing exactly how many days it’s been since last putting figurative pen to paper.
I saw this book on the shelf at my local Barnes & Noble. I picked it up (read: ordered it from Amazon) because I thought it might be helpful in my quest to dig into the infrastructure of comics, as it were. Anything that might deepen my understanding of this intriguing medium — this juxtaposition between pictures (art) and words (storytelling) — must be a good thing.
Though comics of the olden ages provided little more than words and pictures that moved in tandem, describing themselves with little added value per panel, this is changing today. Titles such as
With voices of purest longing meant to sooth the passage of souls from life to death, the White Women of Inkworld are women who won’t be ignored. They are spectral, invisible to all but those clinging to that thinnest thread spanning the gulf between the misery of physical existence and the bliss of eternal rest.
His name was Jesus and they say he was dead three days prior to the discovery of his disappearance from the tomb by his home girls, Mary and Martha. Of course, debate still rages around the issue of what exactly was meant by “three days,” but that is outside the scope of my thoughts, for now.
Can the pain of passage be so exquisite as to border on the erotic? And is it the purview and privilege of messiahs and their Women to wander these temporal states?
What can you write about a book with the word “
This tome, bound with exceptionally heavy card stock, was a fun romp through the history of not-insignificant harem of
In other words, our girls are now the women dominating our cultural collective wet dream. Covers became coverlets, and of course, the less we clothe our women, the more we’ll pay to play. You’d be hard pressed to find many (if any) among the target demographic who’d raise a modest hand in protest.
To much fanfare, and certain relief, enters the Green Lantern. Benevolent caretaker, watcher of society, defender of values, this man among men is the iconic great white hope, or green in this case.
Then there is the woman at the center of a love triangle that exists between her (Carol Ferris), Hal Jordan, and the Green Lantern. Hal loves Carol, Carol loves the Green Lantern, and, well, you get the idea. Hal’s morals are such that he will not reveal his true identity to Carol, as doing so could potentially put her in grave danger for knowing too much. Moreover, Hal wants Carol to fall in love with him — the plain old man — as opposed to Green Lantern — the myth and legend, as it were.
The bird of prey, as quick thinking as the man who created him, lures the pterodactyls into a deep, dark cave that he spots high up on the side of a mountain. Unable to resist the power he has over the prehistoric birds, they follow him into and down the rabbit hole. Once inside, the Green Lantern calls upon the power of his ring to cause the rocks around the opening of the cave to fall in landslide, effectively sealing them inside Venus’s womb forever, where they belong.
The denouement is this: the Green Lantern returns to Earth, transforms back into his alter-self Hal Jordan just in time to ask Carol Ferris out on a date. Alas, she turns him down as visions of the Green Lantern dance in her head. She goes home alone and schemes of ways to hook her talons into the one man she really wants, the one man to rock her world, the one man who can truly complete her empty existence.
Symbolically, the threat confronting these men could be seen as the oncoming, inexorable changes about to be permanently visited upon their established way of life. These blond-haired (furred) predators are interlopers, interfering in the ways of men by doing what blonds do best — distract and acquire target, pluck the heartstrings, emasculate and chain him to the nest.
While an adherence to tradition and gender roles once maintained the integrity of our society-at-large, sweeping societal changes ushered in on wings of pterodactyls raining down from the sky, signal an end to the establishment in ways that will continue to reverberate throughout the coming decades.
Hal receives a plea for help via his lantern from a group of early-humanoid creatures on the planet Venus. They are under attack by a wing of marauding pterodactyls intent on ripping the cavemen to shreds. Under normal circumstances, the Green Lantern would easily dispatch this threat with great aplomb. But these are extraordinary circumstances (of course). These particular pterodactyls are yellow, and as such, the Green Lantern’s superpowers are rendered useless against them. As usual, Hal must out-think and outwit his opponent to prove, once again, that good always triumphs over evil.
In the previous decade, as our men and boys were heeding the call of
And then the war was won. But as quickly as those wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters emerged from their homes, they retreated. Warriors returned home from the battle, forcing their women to trade in their freedom and independence for aprons and anonymity bestowed upon the domestic goddess. We couldn’t have done it without you, Rosie, we quip, with a wink and a love-tap on the rear end.
Hal’s literal weakness is due to an impurity within the light spectrum of the green battery, which is the source of his new-found superhuman abilities. Because of this imperfection, the Green Lantern’s powers are rendered useless when confronting a menace of the color yellow. Ironically, it is this impurity that imbues that battery with its particular energies.
The Green Lantern’s is a story of patriarchal power, a deathbed transference of hegemony from master to apprentice.
Though no one would argue Hal’s qualifications, and in spite of his status as a real man’s man, this superhero in the making does indeed have a weakness (as all superheroes must), one that is significant on both a literal and figurative level. And it is this weakness that becomes not only the theme of Hal Jordan’s transformation to Green Lantern, it also becomes symbolic of an issue poised to tear a society apart in mid-century America, or during what is known as