His hunger hounded him so much that he was insistent in carrying out this project, even to the point of death,” Father Spinale wrote. “He possessed some truths about justice, some facts about the furious violence enacted on Blacks in the South, and he was hungry for a fuller truth. While admitting that John Howard Griffin’s memoir made him deeply uncomfortable at times (in part because the notion of appearing in blackface has become unthinkable for most people six decades later), Father Spinale also praised Griffin for his passions. "Everything is beyond the pale in the New Orleans of A Confederacy of Dunces, and that is what makes the book so darn funny.” Black Like Me “What an imagination Toole had! The ending made me wonder if he would have written a sequel if he had lived. It was a wild read,” commented Mary Ellen Holm. “I finished A Confederacy of Dunces this morning. “I am ashamed that when the book came out I would undoubtedly have been amused by Toole's mean parody of gay people and his equally mean parody of African Americans.”įor others, the novel kept its magical quality. “My chief reaction to the Toole book is shame,” wrote James Speer. “Throughout the novel, he waddles around bursting at the seams in gluttonous sloth and saturated with letters,” wrote Father Spinale, “and, by ‘letters’ I mean that he has stored up in himself words and ideas that make him a truly ‘lettered’ person.”įor some readers, Toole’s novel has not aged well. Reilly’s sturdy frame and absurd appearance-including a hunting cap and a bushy mustache-have been memorialized with a statue in New Orleans. Reilly, to be shot through with melancholy beneath the comedy-perhaps an unconscious reflection by Toole himself on the melancholy of his own life. Everything is beyond the pale in the New Orleans of A Confederacy of Dunces, and that is what makes the book so darn funny.”Ĭatholic Book Club members tended to agree, though some found the main character of the novel, Ignatius J. But I bet you need some humor right now as well-instead of The Brothers Karamazov, instead of Moby-Dick.” He also promised that “if you stick with it, this novel will make you laugh spontaneously, without any self-regard and without any need of knowing precisely what is beyond the pale at this moment in our cultural history. A Confederacy of Duncesįather Spinale noted the dark times swirling around us all during the Covid-19 pandemic, and confessed that “comedy is what I need. While many Catholic Book Club members had read one or both texts in high school or college, Father Spinale was approaching them for the first time, and we benefited mightily from his fresh take and penetrating insights. Our Catholic Book Club moderator, Kevin Spinale, S.J., wrote several interpretive essays about both books to spur discussion and bring up aspects of each one that might be of interest. Both books received critical acclaim upon their initial publication but seem to have lost some of their popularity in recent decades.
#CATHOLIC AUDIO BOOK CLUB SKIN#
Over the summer we read and discussed John Kennedy Toole’s darkly comic novel about New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces, and this fall we are finishing up our discussion of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, a short memoir about his journey through the American South in the 1950s after artificially darkening his skin to appear as a Black man. How did that happen?īut that is the only thing they had in common. While we try to rotate among different genres in our four selections for the Catholic Book Club every year (from novels to biographies to memoirs to short story collections to poetry and more), our summer and fall selections for 2020 offered two books about the American South by men named John. We have strong evidence that despite many reports of its demise over the past decade, a culture of book reading continues to flourish. Of course, let us be honest: Most of us have been more or less trapped in our homes for seven months. Combined with the Catholic Book Club newsletter, which reaches almost 12,000 readers every week, we have strong evidence that despite many reports of its demise over the past decade, a culture of book reading continues to flourish. Not bad, considering that three years ago at this time, the group had four members (all editors at America). In August of this year, the Catholic Book Club hit a new benchmark for our Facebook discussion group.
0 kommentar(er)
