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 middleaged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately finding Cucla the young and freespirited 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 Nazioccupied 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.Linguistically explosive and socially relevant her works are solid evidence that Rikki Ducornet is one of the most interesting writers around ... We are living in an age of intellectual and emotional starvation that is largely without spirituality cynical about social change and disconnected from the natural world. We need writers to look at these difficult issues in a sophisticated manner. Ducornet has done this. She is the mirror of our innermost selves. And she gives us back to ourselvesampmdashdespairing hopeful active contemplative fractured but surviving playful even happy sometimes and always whole ... Ducornets villains have the best lines ... one only has to think of Hitler or PolPot or any of our assorted tyrants to know that Ducornets figures are ... taken from life.ampmdashThe NationEntering Fire displays a cheerfully gruesome audacity and an imagination both lively and bizarre.ampmdashThe New York TimesEntering Fire is about the metaphoric and potentially evil properties of language it is about origins and motives of mythmaking. This is a novel of ideas often strange ideas that is sustained throughout by b