When I was perhaps twelve or thirteen I went through a spell of reading books my father had just finished. One of these was A Confederacy of Dunces, which, he told me with transparent joy, was a real masterpiece.

I read it – and remember being confused by several aspects of the picaresque cod-Odyssey of Ignatius J Reilly, not least why his long-suffering mother, Irene, would keep her muscatel inside the oven.

Given that ACoD was published before I was born, though, what’s mystified me more in the last five or six years is that nobody appeared to have recorded it. Until two months ago.

Corpulent, flatulent, and an outlandish pseud (Toole’s title is an epigram from Swift), the 30-year-old Ignatius went to college for eight years and has a degree in Medieval History, but now sits around all day watching television in his mother’s house in New Orleans: “that Hoboken near the gulf of Mexico.”

Clad in “mammoth yellow drawers” and a backwoodsman’s deerstalker, our lute-playing hypochondriacal hero also suffers from a “hyperactive valve” that threatens to slam shut whenever he is asked to do anything that looks like work.

After a run-in with an over-enthusiastic New Orleans policeman, however, and the half-cut Irene pranging the family Plymouth, Ignatius is sent out to find gainful employment, first as a filing clerk in a pants (ie trouser) factory, and then as a roving hotdog vendor. Cue: much hilarity.

Distasteful, unsympathetic, and possessed of a truly epic lack of self-awareness (a “fat turd” is how someone succinctly puts it), Ignatius is also – of course – a writer.

I’m not a chap much given to LOL-ing (in the capital letters sense, anyway); but this is honestly a not-safe-for-packed-train-journeys kind of novel

His bedroom is littered with Big Chief tablets full of his world view, a “monumental indictment” of mankind and its decline over the past four centuries, which one day he hopes to sell to Hollywood (complete with tips on musical numbers).

Largely obsessed with the teachings of Boethius (which he at one point forces on an undercover cop, in a public convenience) and his own perceived persecution by the goddess Fortuna and her wheel, this deranged 25-stone Don Quixote believes canned food is a “perversion”, harbours a grudge against the “dreary fraud” Mark Twain, and has a plan to bring about world peace by filling the military with “masquerading sodomites”.

Like the first King Charles, “I mingle with my peers or no-one. And since I have no peers…”

Then there is the matter of his masochistic pen-pal relationship with the mad, Jewish political activist (or “liberated doxy”) Myrna Minkoff, who, he believes, should be “lashed… about the erogenous zones.”

“Oh mah Gard…!!” as Ignatius would say.

The tragic real-life tale behind A Confederacy of Dunces is almost as cultishly infamous as the book itself.

A mummy’s boy, albeit an over-achieving one (a professor at 22), ACoD was written while Toole endured a military draft teaching English to soldiers in Puerto Rico (he was quite good at that too). Before the book was finished, Toole already worried that he was starting to associate a bit too closely with his anti-hero – the first but certainly not the last of his readers (or listeners) to do so.

Rejected by numerous publishers – Simon & Schuster told him the book “d[id] not have a reason” – and suffering from paranoia and depression, Toole killed himself aged only 31. His mother finally got the novel published eleven years after his death – whereupon it promptly won the Pulitzer Prize (an irony so grindingly inevitable I remember ripping it off for a school creative writing class). A Confederacy of Dunces is now one of the BBC’s “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”.

I’m not a chap much given to LOL-ing (in the capital letters sense, anyway); but this is honestly a not-safe-for-packed-train-journeys kind of novel. On several counts.

An equal-opportunities misanthrope, with unfailingly rebarbative views on just about everything since the Enlightenment, it’s no great surprise that Ignatius is unimpressed by women, black people, Protestants, homosexuals, amateur art groups, you name it.

“Please be aware,” a voice from corporate legal services pipes up in the audio, “the following recording contains instances of racist language, as well as themes or characterisations which some listeners may find offensive.” And one might well worry that publishers would be a little hesitant these days about a character who yells “rape her!” at the cinema screen, calls people “mongoloids”, and says that “negroes” working in a dingy clothing factory were better off in the al fresco cotton fields.

So I was delighted – nay, relieved – to find ACoD “remains” a (darkly) comic masterpiece, and its hero one of the great fictional creations. And also to see that New Orleans has a statue of Ignatius.

The novel’s now been audio’d by American comedian Reginald D Hunter, who is, among other things, not white, fat, or from Louisiana. But neither is he shy of controversial language; so if this was done merely to draw the sting of all the non-PC stuff, then good. With any luck, it’ll open up ACoD to a whole new market/generation of fans. (Paradoxically, Toole’s acclaimed transcription of the Noo-Orlins dialect – all “grammaws” and “communiss” – is lost in an audio version; but Hunter’s rendition certainly beats whatever I’d have conjured in my reading mind.)

As it turns out, there was a previous audiobook (just not on British Audible), read – no kidding – by one Barrett Whitener. There’ve been a couple of stage plays, too. And ACoD should obviously have been filmed multiple times by now – and nearly has: but at least four (large) men slated to play Ignatius have died! There are also two or three decent-looking biographies of Toole now, an “adolescent” first novel (posthumous, natch), and even A Confederacy of Dunces-themed cookery book. I bought that last one for my dad. I hope it says to keep the tramp wine in the oven.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Audiobook read by Reginal D Hunter, 13h 38m, Penguin Audio, £22.74

ASH Smyth is a writer and radio presenter, living in Stanley. He is a member of the Falkland Islands Defence Force, and previously served in the Honourable Artillery Company, in Helmand and Kabul