Outside, the glare was oppressive, but not for us in the Hendek Bostan, the 'Moat Gardens', where we sat, invisible to the outside world, in the shade of a giant fig tree draped with generous swags of vine as if in a Gobelins tapestry.

The distraction was simply the idyllic setting – I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. It was a good talk, not a wasted word – occasionally interspersed with intriguing background information from Aleks Sapov, who had initiated the movement to rescue the bostans a month ago.

Perfectly audible above the rustling leaves that muffled the distant traffic, she was hardly to blame. Adulation for Toole?s comic epic remains as intense today as it was at the time of its initial publication.At first it seemed it would be impossible to follow Chantel White's softly spoken words as she described the changing fortunes of Yedikule's bostans. The genius of A Confederacy of Dunces is reaffirmed as successive generations embrace this extravagant satire. Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubbed ?slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one.? Set in New Orleans with a wild cast of characters including Ignatius and his mother Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levi Pants inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry and Jones, the jivecat in space-age dark glasses, the novel serves as an outlandish but believable tribute to a city defined by its parade of eccentric denizens. A Confederacy of Dunces features one of the most memorable protagonists in American literature, Ignatius J. This literary underdog and comic masterpiece has sold more than two million copies in over two dozen languages. Though the manuscript was rejected by many publishers during John Kennedy Toole?s lifetime, his mother successfully published the book years after her son?s suicide, and it won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. After four decades, the peerless wit and indulgent absurdity of A Confederacy of Dunces continues to attract new readers.

A cornucopia of dunderheads