[This brief review of Tito Perdue’s Fields of Asphodel is reproduced for the benefit of enthusiasts and bibliomanes. By Jim Dwyer for Library Journal, 15 June 2007. I copied the text from the Barnes and Noble website and trusted the date from encyclopedia.com.]
Curmudgeonly classical Greek scholar Leland Pefley, who despises all things contemporary and regrets the passage of ‘the pre-post-modern world, obsolete these seventy years,’ finds himself in an eerie ‘anti-world’ that is ‘no afterworld, no, but rather the same planet he had known.’ He resumes the quest to find his deceased wife and his struggles against the forces of cultural mediocrity, begun in Lee and The New Austerities. Lee joins a seemingly endless hegira with a ragtag band of egoists but is so arrogant that he even rejects the friendship of a Latin scholar, considering the Romans second-rate despoilers of the Greek legacy. Lee is so prickly, uncompromising, and thoroughly unlikable that his constant frustrations, travails, and hardships are a source of guilty pleasure. He makes some very good points about contemporary society but in a way that alienates potential allies in both the living world and the ‘anti-world.’ Perdue’s books may become cult classics but are unlikely to be of general interest. Recommended for larger academic and public libraries only. [Lee will be rereleased in paperback simultaneously with Fields of Asphodel. — Ed.] — Jim Dwyer.
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