Have you ever read The conspiracy of fools? Do you know what it is about? Perhaps it is the moment when you read a story in which you weigh how people used to live and how they are done now, a novel that encompasses a critique of society by an author who also felt inadequate.
So we are going to recount you, of course without telling you the end, everything that you are going to find in this book.
Who wrote the conspiracy of fools
The author to whom we owe The conspiracy of fools is John Kennedy Toole. He was born in New Orleans in 1937 and died 31 years later, in 1969. His book was not published while he was alive, but was published posthumously (in 1980) and received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.
John was the son of John and Thelma Toole, very protective parents towards their son, especially his mother, who was unable to let him play with other children. That made him turn to his studies and was an exemplary student. He graduated from Tulane University and completed a BA in English at Columbia. After that, he began working as an assistant professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana for a year.
From there he went to New York, to occupy a teaching position at Hunter College.
However, he did not lose his vocation for training, as he tried to get a doctorate. However, having to go to the army, where he spent two years teaching English to Spanish-speaking recruits, made him give up.
When he returned from the war, he settled in New Orleans where he lived with his parents and began working at the Dominican College. However, he also helped his friends (for example by selling tamales) or, after graduating with honors from Tulane University, working in a men's clothing factory.
All this he captured in his book, The Conspiracy of Fools, and when he finished it he sent it to the Simon & Schuster publishing house. But this was rejected because "it wasn't really about anything." Then Toole started to get depressed. He took to drinking, stopped working and ended up committing suicide at the age of 31.
Journalist Jorge Méndez was his mother who then fought for someone to read her son's work. And that someone was Walker Percy who, tired of the insistence, did it, being delighted with the book. Hence, Percy was the foreword to the book. As a result of this success, another novel was rescued that the author had written when he was 16 years old, and which he considered to be bad, The Neon Bible.
What is the conspiracy of fools about
In The Conspiracy of Fools you will meet a main character, Ignatius J. Reilly. This man is a misfit and an anachronist. He would love to live in a medieval way, with his ways of living, his morals, etc. Therefore, for the whole world to hear, he makes the decision to write hundreds of notebooks where he unleashes that vision of the world. Each of the notebooks takes up a space in his room, without any order, although he has the firm intention of ordering them. Someday.
For him, work is something very bad, something that has to be suffered because the world is capitalist and that he considers to be a form of slavery. So he ends up comparing himself with Boethius (who accepted his own execution) and sets about looking for one to live. And from there a story is spun that, although it will make you laugh a lot, it will also show you in an exaggerated way, what today's society is like: with its selfishness, cruelty, sadness ...
In short, yes, you will laugh with the book, but you will also feel sorry to see how the world has become and how before this was not like that, nor was it governed by principles that now seem to have all followed in order to be able to « adapt ”and be one of society.
The synopsis of the book
Here is its synopsis:
The Conjuration Of Fools is a crazy, acid and highly intelligent novel. But not only that, it is also tremendously funny and bitter at the same time. Laughter escapes by itself before the disproportionate situations of this great tragicomedy. Ignatius J. Really is probably one of the best characters ever created and whom many do not hesitate to compare with Don Quixote. Furthermore, he is the perfect antiprotagonist for a novel full of excellent characters, set in the port city of New Orleans, masterful Ignatius.
He is misunderstood, a person in his early thirties who lives in his mother's house and who struggles to achieve a better world from inside his room. But cruelly he will be dragged to wander the streets of New Orleans in search of work, forced to enter the society, with which he maintains a relationship of mutual repulsion, to be able to defray the expenses caused by his mother in a car accident while I was driving drunk. The author, John K. Toole, gets a middle-class review.
It manages to maintain the interest of the reader (even greater in a second reading than in the first) with a range of characters who are more unpleasant. He leaves no puppet with a head and, through Ignatius' devious and convoluted personality, he gives a review of the time he lived in a mocking tone that contrasts with the sad vision of the lives of the portrayed characters. We don't just find a crazy and harrowing story of social criticism, but the plot hooks right from the start. Moment in which, as its protagonist says, Fortuna turns its wheel downwards and we never know what is the unpleasant surprise that destiny brings us.
From here, some situations hook up with others, just as the characters do, and a huge snowball is formed that will end up exploding at the end of the novel. After finishing La Conjura De Los Focios, at the age of 32, the author unsuccessfully tried to get it published. This led to a deep depression that led to suicide. Thanks to the tenacity and insistence of his mother, today we can enjoy this delicious work that has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. We can also find The Neon Bible published, a novel written when the author was 16 years old.
What style and structure does it have
The novel is divided into chapters, which in turn are divided into sub-chapters. All of them They are in the third person and the irony is part of the text. However, there are some parts that you will be able to read in the first person, being Ignatius's vision. These help to understand both the character and the story itself. These are part of the notebooks that she writes, as well as the letters that she writes with her friend, Myrna Minkoff, with whom she clashes with her vision of the world, but at the same time she feels that she completes it.
Many think that the story of The Plot of Fools has much of the life of John Kennedy Toole, which comes to reflect parts of his own story, not only because of the character's location, but also because of the different jobs he does, or because of the relationship he has with his mother. Even that desire because what he writes serves to change reality or the world.
Now that you know a little better The conspiracy of fools, you will see that it is a timeless novel, that can be applied in this society as well as in the past or in the future, and that the character himself makes you face his vision, ironic and cruel, of the world. Now, whether he was right or not will only depend on your opinion. Have you read it? Will you give it a try?