One for book lovers in a relaxing and intimate venue. Chatting about a mutual passion is one of the ways to get to know people so come along and express your views on our chosen novel, your week ahead, or any other subject that comes up.
March's Book, but dont worry if you have not read it come along and tell us what books you do enjoy.
A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published by LSU Press in 1980, eleven years after the author's suicide. The book, published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a revealing foreword) and Toole's mother Thelma Toole, quickly became a cult classic, and later a mainstream success. Toole posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. It is now considered a canonical work of modern Southern literature.[1]
The title derives from the epigraph by Jonathan Swift: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." (Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting)
The story is set in New Orleans in the early 1960s. The central character is Ignatius J. Reilly, an educated but slothful 30-year-old man still living with his mother in the city's Uptown neighborhood, who, due to an incident early in the book, must set out to get a job. In his quest for employment he has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters.
