La conjura de los necios

Everything about this book is extraordinary, starting with its story. Written in the early 1960s, John Kennedy Toole was unable to get it published; believing himself a frustrated writer, he committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 32. His mother tirelessly pursued its publication, finally succeeding in 1980 (when she was 79), thanks to the support of the great novelist Walker Percy, and only with a university press in Louisiana, a seemingly unpromising prospect for literary acclaim. And yet, the book achieved immense success within a few months, culminating in the 1981 Pulitzer Prize and the most enthusiastic and unanimous critical acclaim in many years. Its author has been compared to Cervantes, Fielding, Swift, Rabelais, Dickens... It is impossible to summarize the picaresque and consistently surprising plot of this work, set in New Orleans and its underworld. Its central figure is one of the most memorable characters in American literature: Ignatius Reilly —a blend of a delirious Oliver Hardy, an obese Don Quixote, and a perverse Thomas Aquinas, all rolled into one— who, at thirty, lives with his eccentric mother, preoccupied with writing a lengthy and scathing denunciation of our century, as devoid of "theology and geometry" as it is of "decency and good taste"; a deranged diatribe against a deranged society. Due to an unexpected need for money, he finds himself "catapulted into the fever of contemporary existence," embarking on the most outlandish jobs and ventures.