ENTERING FIRE - Softcover

Ducornet, Rikki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701129506 ISBN 13: 9780701129507

Publisher: Random House UK, 1987

Synopsis

This startling and brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of two 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 mother in prewar Europe, seething with hatred of the father who abandoned him. He rises to power in Nazi-occupied France, where he goes mad in an obsessive pursuit of racial purity. Rikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans.

About this title

Reviews

In this parody of French fascism, Lamprias de Bergerac, a hedonistic Frenchman who becomes rich and famous for creating popular orchids, marries a cool, aristocratic woman who, as he puts it, has "thick, black eyebrows, close set, like centipedes about to copulate." After one night togethershe conceives but is shocked by his sensualityshe shuns him, and he seeks pleasure elsewhere, traveling around the world for years at a time. The couple's stuffy, narrow-minded son, Septimus, hates his father and his father's lusty love of exotic people and plants. As Septimus grows up, he becomes obsessed with racial purity, supports the Nazis during the Occupation, flees to South America, and then comes to the U.S., where his father now lives (and denounces him to J. Edgar Hoover during the McCarthy era). This tale resonates with a variety of human feelings. Ducornet is an American who lives in France.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701129506
• ISBN 13: 9780701129507
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160