Customer Reviews

Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Like the fiction of William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, the poetic prose is what makes Perdue's book a great work of southern literature. The language is so beautiful as to render the plot of secondary importance. In his previous novels, Mr. Perdue's main character was Lee. His grandfather, Ben is the hero of Opportunities. Trying to earn his way in the post Civil War era, Ben leaves the family farm and turns his ability to spell to account by gaining a teaching position and a wife with acres of farmland, and later, a government job. Perdue's talent is that he paints the nobility and humor in this uniquely southern character with sensitive and lush verbal coloration. A beautiful book - but very unlike his early novels

For your consideration, imagine a late nineteenth-century part-time farmer, mail carrier, and sometimes school teacher dwelling upon a plot of ground that runs down, quite literally, to the edge of the earth itself. Imagine him, further, as the most naive and most earnest man who ever lived and then, continuing in this vein, imagine a Paleolithic Alabama infested by active volcanoes where bands of wandering flagellants trespass by night, a time when the planets haven't yet settled into final form and forlorn men come to town fetching pigs to market at the end of a leash.
Now, stay one moment more as I explain that all this is seen through a fog of thought and memory and the best-cadenced prose we've seen in this country for a very long time.Fields of AsphodelLee

I loved this book. It just flows through geologic periods, through space and time with no limits. It's very dreamlike, with little realism. A young man, Ben, lives in Alabama with his father and ten brothers at the edge of the world among volcanoes and planets, measuring the world by the size of the family's property. Ben finally grows up, leaves the farm and ventures into the city to seek an education and get a job. He winds up running a dry goods store and has difficulty making money because he doesn't want to part with the merchandise he considers most beautiful. He marries a girl whose house has burned down, but who still has the land. Then he takes a test and winds up with a job as a mail carrier, able to support a family. This is a most unusual, imaginative and quite funny book. Fields of Asphodel