This book will take you on a wild and unpredictable ride. Every time I recommend it to a friend they read the back cover, look at the oddball picture on the front and give me a puzzled look. But I insist they give it a try. Soon they are telling me they can't put it down and before I know it they've leant it out to somebody else and bought themselves a copy.

Ignatius J. Riley will get under your skin. He is repulsive and adorable at the same time. He has to be the vilest character that fiction ever produced. When reading the things that Ignatius does and thinks you will find yourself simultaneously laughing and shrieking with horror.

Ignatius is brilliant, a student of philosophy and higher learning. Yet, somewhere along the way something in Ignatius has gone terribly wrong. His worldview suggests insanity at times and plain and simple truth at others.

Ignatius manages to get mixed up in altercations with the law, wild parties, peasant revolts and upheaval wherever he goes. There is a cloud of oppression following him and even though he is the picture of disgusting morals and slovenliness, you find yourself champion his cause. Even the man whose company Ignatius single handedly put in pearl, Gus Levy, said of Ignatius, "Sometimes you have to see a person in his real environment to understand him." He felt sorry for the 'kook' who tried to destroy him.

Ignatius's poor mother becomes a villain, along with his nemesis and oddly romantic love-interest, Mirna Minx, who sends him desperate dispatches as crazy and thought provoking as his own.

This story will transfix you. You will want to see this slovenly beast succeed, against all odds. In the end you will want to know Ignatius and champion his cause, which will make you question your own sanity, as he is no less repulsive as the story draws to a close. You will laugh your way through this roller coaster ride and feel a certain discomforting feeling that this poor man's life may in fact mirror that of the author, John Kennedy Toole, who committed suicide before seeing the book's publication and later rise to Pulitzer Prize winning fame.