Just finished, absolutely loved it. There’s a lot of richness and depth to this book that I’d love to sit and unpack but I feel like I’d need to give it a second read to really dissect it.
However…it didn’t really make me laugh. Not in the way that some people say it did for them.
Sure, I read it and chuckled out loud or thought to myself “oh man” during certain parts or just silently acknowledged how funny something was, but I’m seeing so many people being like “if you’re not ROARING with laughter and squirting your apple juice out of your nose every five pages then this book ISNT FOR YOU!!” It’s definitely the funniest book I’ve ever read but…idk it was also just sad.
Ignatius wasn’t too absurd or moronic or pathetic to be believable because I’ve known my fair share of Ignatius’s…hell I’ve been one in one way or another at times. Parts of this book were like a punch in the gut and it just feels like it would be way funnier if trad cath incel neckbeards weren’t real as fuck.
I think that this book stands as a window into race and politics in the time and place this book takes place in and is an interesting critique of modernism/the modern world, showing how people cope – or fail to cope – with the insanity of the 20th century. Even though Ignatius might be a man out of time who would have been a lauded cynical mind a thousand years in the past, he’s so far from blameless that it ventures into the absurd comedy that makes people love this book so much.
One of the most interesting contrasts I personally found was Dorian and Ignatius. While Ignatius seems to identify a level of sickness in the way that things are and answers by refusing to participate or belong in society at all, Dorian, whose position as a gay man is much worse than Ignatius’s, seems to embrace the notion of finding peace in a mad and hostile world by playing it like a masquerade and rejecting taking any part of it seriously as a whole. In taking himself or his world view seriously, Ignatius loses where Dorian succeeds in embracing the absurdity of fitting into a society that wants to reject him just as badly as Ignatius wants to reject society.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on it/themes that you’ve discovered while reading it.
by BrennusRex