Title: Re: A Confederacy of Dunces
Post by: opinionista on February 19, 2008, 09:02:50 pm
I loved this book. I actually heard about it the first time in the movie Sideways (have you seen it?), and got interested in it. I thought it was a very funny story.
Title: Re: A Confederacy of Dunces
Post by: Kd5000 on February 19, 2008, 10:17:48 pm
Do you know much about the author?? He committed suicide before his book was ever published. To include gay characters in a manuscript in the early 1960's might have been too much for the publishing industry. He left a suicide note which his mother destroyed before anyone ever saw what it said. So nobody knows why he did it. I remember ppl saying "since he had a smothering mother and committed suicide, I wonder if he was gay..." You know, the old psychological explanation about how a domineering mother making a son gay... The wikipedia entry on John Kennedy O'Toole is quite interesting. His mother made it a personal crusade to get her late son's novel published. I heard she was a real piece of work. Everytime I've started to read the story, I've always been interupted with some distraction.