A Confederacy of Dunces

This book, written by John Kennedy Toole and published posthumously after he killed himself at age 32, was awarded the Pulitzer and received lots of rave reviews. I chose it from the PBS's "The Great American Read" list of 100 books for my book group --we all selected one book we had always wanted to read-- but after two nights of trying, I gave up. Walker Percy, who was convinced to read the manuscript by Toole's mother, read it 3 times and calls it "A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimension..." and the Chicago Sun-Times says of the book "What a delight, what a roaring, rollicking, footstamping wonder this book is!" It did NOT make me laugh. I did not find the characters amusing or even pitiful. They just annoyed me, so I gave up. The Indepdendent calls it "the book of a lifetime" and goes on to say, "A Confederacy of Dunces is a story of loneliness amid crowds, a comedy that hurts. At the centre is an anti-hero named Ignatius J Reilly. If Don Quixote had been thrust into the underbelly of modern New Orleans, this is exactly who he would have become. Hypochondriac, melancholic, a walking catastrophe..."It is, indeed, set in New Orleans and they have even erected a statue of the main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, on Canal Street.
This review in The Guardian tells you more about the author and the book. Other rave reviews come from Kirkus, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.