About Cynosura

Arrogance and romance    

Cynosura is a feverish love story between a non-ordinary Tennessee farm girl of supernal physical beauty and an estranged youth possessed of exceptional intellectual ambition.

The girl, a gifted and hard-working cellist, is a natural-born elitist, contemptuous, or anyway indifferent, to ordinary people. Her self-selected life’s mission is to identify the man to whom she will want to consecrate her life. She is sexual, intelligent, melancholy, efficient, and intuits that her life will be short.

The boy, preternaturally brilliant, is not in love with life. He chooses solitude so as not to have to compromise with friends (he hasn’t any) or colleagues. Value, he believes, derives solely from the mind and imagination, though he is too young, of course, to have developed a full philosophy. He abhors capitalist practice and strives for self-sufficiency at the price of poverty.

Their brief and explosive affair approaches transcendence.

“Tito Perdue’s Cynosura returns to themes of his most light-hearted novel, The Sweet-Scented Manuscript. It is a love story, a first-love story, a swooning and delirious—but also intellectual and serious—love story about two talented and alienated young people who become one another’s world. But Cynosura returns to the themes of young love from the point of view of old age. It is a death-haunted tale. It forces the reader to raise the question: How does one love a woman who has no future? The answer is: With all the intensity one can muster. It is a lesson for us all, because given enough time, none of us has a future. Cynosura shows us that love becomes much sweeter when death takes a seat at the feast.” — Greg Johnson, author of You Asked for It