A Confederacy of Dunces

This modern classic of American literature did that rare thing of making me laugh out loud. A lot. It's both repulsive and unrelenting, a novel where not much may seem to happen, but it's the characters, and in particular Ignatius C. Reilly, who make it a hysterically brutal read.

Ignatius is a testament to sloth, rage and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern, a horrible man, a noble crusader against a world of dunces. Although considering himself to have an expansive and learned worldview, Ignatius has an aversion to ever leaving the town of his birth, and frequently bores friends and strangers with the story of his sole, abortive journey from New Orleans, a trip to Baton Rouge on a Greyhound bus, which Ignatius recounts as a traumatic ordeal of extreme horror. Ignatius is happy to watch his city and document the life and times of New Orleans on his big tablets until his mother decrees that he must find work. What follows is a number of hilarious encounters with colourful characters in New Orleans' French Quarter.

The book is famed for its descriptions, some accurate and some imagined, of glorious New Orleans in the early sixties, with characters talking in local dialect and referring to famed hometown delicacies and sites. But these are background to the marvellously absurd adventures of its main character and his struggled against an unseen confederacy of dunces.