John Kennedy Toole war ein amerikanischer Romanautor, dessen Werke, darunter der gefeierte Roman 'Eine verschworene Gemeinschaft der Dummköpfe', zu Lebzeiten unveröffentlicht blieben. Nach seinem Tod brachte seine Mutter das Manuskript in die Hände des Schriftstellers Walker Percy, der maßgeblich zur Veröffentlichung beitrug. Toole's Schreiben wird für seinen unverwechselbaren Humor und seine scharfen Beobachtungen der menschlichen Verfassung gefeiert. Seine einzigartige literarische Stimme bietet eine fesselnde Auseinandersetzung mit Charakter und Gesellschaft, die posthum mit dem Pulitzer-Preis für Fiktion ausgezeichnet wurde.
Ignatius J. Reilly ist schon von weitem eine groteske Erscheinung: Tweedhose, Flanellhemd, Schal und grüne Jagdmütze umhüllen den überdimensionierten, unter den Launen einer sensiblen Verdauung leidenden Körper. Sein Geist hingegen leidet an der Verkommenheit der Welt und ihrer Bewohner. Lange Zeit konnte der verkrachte Intellektuelle beiden aus dem Weg gehen, doch das träge Leben auf Kosten seiner Mutter findet ein jähes Ende, als sie in Geldnot gerät und ihn zum Arbeiten zwingt. Ob am Hotdog-Stand oder in der Hosenfabrik - Ignatius stiftet Unheil, wo immer er auftaucht.
The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.
John Kennedy Toole, autor slavného Spolčení hlupců, napsal Neonovou bibli již v šestnácti letech, vydání se však dočkala až dvacet let po jeho tragické smrti. Jde o zvláštní a temnou knihu, v níž se na rozdíl od Spolčení hlupců jen občas zablesknou groteskní náznaky a satirická nálada. Působivý baladický příběh je umocněn jednoduchým jazykem a naprosto přímočarým proudem vyprávění. Bilingvní vydání.
Игнациус Ж. Райлли - интеллектуал, идеолог, лодырь, посмешище, обжора. Гаргантюа, презирающий современность за недостаток должной теологии и геометрии. Опустившийся Фома Аквинский, который ведет свою безнадежную войну против всех: Фрейда, гомосексуалистов, гетеросексуалов, протестантов и всевозможных излишеств века, главным образом - междугородных автобусов. Литературный герой, не имеющий аналогов в мировой сатирической литературе. Новоорлеанский писатель Джон Кеннеди Тул (1937-1969) не дожил до присуждения своему великому детищу Пулитцеровской премии (1981). И вот теперь "Сговор остолопов", самый оригинальный комический эпос XX века, - впервые на русском языке.
<i>Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21417799-a-confederacy-of-dunces" rel="nofollow noopener">here</a></i> <b>"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."</b> Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i>. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job. Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> 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. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life.
