I first read this book many years ago, and for me, it took a little while to truly capture my attention. Once I had read several chapters, I was hooked, totally. It is a book that has stayed with me for years, like any really good book does.
The story revolves around the darkly comic adventures of Ignatius Reilly, a total misfit adult overweight man living with his elderly mother in a lower class neighborhood of New Orleans. It immerses the readers into the dialogue, characters and life of New Orleans and the French Quarter, in the era of the early sixties. Ignatius is as peculiar and bazaar as the City of New Orleans, itself.
This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, twelve years after the author committed suicide at the age of thirty-two. It was due to the persistence of the late author's mother that the novel even got published. The mother hounded the then professor at Loyola University, Walter Percy, who finally read the manuscript, fell in love with it and the tragic story behind it, and eventually got it published. Percy, a great writer in his own right, never won the prodigious Pulitzer Prize but is credited with that honor going to this author, instead.
I loved this book and will return to it, again. Highly recommended; a 5-star rating.
The story revolves around the darkly comic adventures of Ignatius Reilly, a total misfit adult overweight man living with his elderly mother in a lower class neighborhood of New Orleans. It immerses the readers into the dialogue, characters and life of New Orleans and the French Quarter, in the era of the early sixties. Ignatius is as peculiar and bazaar as the City of New Orleans, itself.
This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, twelve years after the author committed suicide at the age of thirty-two. It was due to the persistence of the late author's mother that the novel even got published. The mother hounded the then professor at Loyola University, Walter Percy, who finally read the manuscript, fell in love with it and the tragic story behind it, and eventually got it published. Percy, a great writer in his own right, never won the prodigious Pulitzer Prize but is credited with that honor going to this author, instead.
I loved this book and will return to it, again. Highly recommended; a 5-star rating.
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