""Oh my God!""
Where does A Confederacy of Dunces rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Up there more for the energy of
the plot and the depth of characters and the skill of the telling than
Barrett Whitener's performance. I grew to like it, but it has its
challenges.
What did you like best about this story?
The twisted relationship with
correspondent "The Minx", as well as the "Oh my God!" bursts regularly
from our bloated protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly at every outrage he
witnesses.
Which character – as performed by Barrett Whitener – was your favorite?
George, the prissy foil who turns
confidante to Ignatius in a skillfully paced conversation that shows
off the talent of John Kennedy Toole. Toole builds up both interlocutors
so that the naivete of one and the conniving of the other get switched
and jumbled as well as run parallel. JKT handles the tone of each of his
lowlife participants deftly, from New Orleans.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Hotdogs and Pigtails
Any additional comments?
Burma Jones is not easy to convey
"live"; Whitener began the novel sounding in the omniscient narrator's
voice as far too neutral and robotic. The women are shown with varying
degrees of success, and the registers of different N.O.L.A. dialects and
timbres is no easy task to keep moving here. The plot does go into a
lot of side stories, building slowly, but the value of "A Confederacy of
Dunces" rests in the care JKT takes to portray each figure. (Audible US 2/16/17) 
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