Book of a lifetime: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

From The Independent archive: Elif Shafak finds herself between sanity and insanity in a story of loneliness amid crowds, a comedy that hurts – where the writer left before the world recognised his extraordinary talent

‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ was eventually published 11 years after Toole’s death (Alamy)

So I had left Istanbul with its colourful chaos and ended up in a place in America where the wind blew hot as a hair dryer, huge thorny cacti greeted newcomers and Spanish was the official language. What was I doing in Tucson, Arizona? Teaching, writing a new novel... The part of me that couldn’t settle down, always a nomad, an outsider, East and West, and yet precisely because of that at home everywhere, that stubborn part was holding the reins. It was as if I had taken a plastic globe, given it a real good spin, and randomly put my finger on a spot.

Tucson was a liberal bubble in a Republican state, surrounded with a desert that released fragrances of wild herbs and howls of coyotes. There was in the air a sense of living at the end of the world. This is where I read, for the first time, A Confederacy of Dunces.

My second day in town I walked past the strangest bookstore: incense sticks, horoscope charms, goddess symbols, and amid them all, gems of world literature. My eyes landed on a novel. Its title reminded me of Attar’s The Conference of Birds, and of Simurgh, itinerant birds that didn’t know what they were searching high and low was within him. I bought the book and a few incense sticks: anti-stress ocean breeze.