Entering Fire

by Rikki Ducornet

Book Overview

This startling and brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of two men: a father and his estranged son. Lamprias de Bergerac is a gentle mystic and amateur botanist who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately finding Cucla, the young and free-spirited native woman who has become the love of his life. Meanwhile, his demented son Septimus is raised by his...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872863557
• ISBN13: 9780872863552
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

a fire worth entering

Not many novels come with a warning, but it doesn't take long to realize that Ducornet's "Entering Fire" is well worth the shvitz. She is skilled at the art of narrative seduction and takes the pleasures and profane mysticism of story telling seriously. Her prose is singularly cunning, lush and probing and with whip-smart, mischievous relish she takes on themes that few would dare tinker with. I can only encounter this novel with curious wonder and leave its world burdened and crushed, bewitched and joyous. To look bravely into the heart of "Entering Fire", one must see the ever-intertwined lives of human brutality and tenderness, and in doing so, it becomes evident that Ducornet is raising important questions about the implications of the stories we choose to love and why. But she doesn't do so by asking -- she just lets them boil over in perfect surfeit like everything else.

I CREATED A ...

Rikki Ducornet is probably one of the most overlooked novelists of the past 25 years. I think she is a very important writer just shy of being great. Like her previous novel, The Stain, Entering Fire is sexually charged and exhibits a sensuousness seen only in latin american writers like Marquez and Fuentes (except those two authors are boring). Entering Fire, which begins in 1880's Paris, on the surface, is about an amatuer botanist named Lamprias de Bergerac, a descendant of the famous long nosed Cyrano. Not known to the average person is that Cyrano conducted alchemical experiments and composed what may be the first sci-fi story about a trip to the moon. Lamprias has inherited that quest for knowledge from him, even if it goes against the moral conventions of his day. A lover of women, stuck in a loveless marriage with the aptly named Virginie, he takes on many concubines in his travels, even having the nerve to bring home one such from China with ironic name of Dust. Lamp goes further by having a child by his mistress, named First Man. Most of the book focuses on Lamp's travels and the adventures that he has in the jungle which are quite fascinating. Meanwhile, his son by Virginie, named Septimus, feels replaced by First Man, and begins to develop a xenophobia because of it. He feels inferior so he has to become a racist to make himself feel superior, with the encouragement of his mother, whose reasons are the same, feeling replaced by Dust. In the end he becomes a Nazi supporter during World War II and helps send his father's first love to the death camps of the Gestapo. Basically, you have two intertwining stories in the book, one of Lamprias, as he tries to discover a new Eden through physical and spiritual quests and willing to sacrifice his family to gain it. The other is that of his son's descent into madness and the love of his father which, once being rejected turns into a hatred of all those he sees as inferior. Most of the novel is powerful and dissects the madness and obsessions that humans can get locked into. The parts with the son are especially frightening by showing how a person can brainwash themselves into devaluing human life. Something that Ducornet has that so many of her high minded peers do not have is a sense of humor. This book could have been very apocalyptic but shining through everything that's going on is humor. For example, when Lamp recounts how he met Virginie, he says how impressed he was with her poetic speech and the deepness of her intellect. Unknown to him, she had simply memorized verses and thoughts from her school textbook and really didn't even know what she was talking about. She was just repeating them like a robot. He found out too late. Of course, just like comics have bad jokes, Ducornet doesn't always hit it. I highly recommend this book. I believe that some day Ducornet will join the great writers of my time where she belongs. Until then, I guess she will be my little secret.