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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Set in 19th-century Baja California, an associate of Gustav Eiffel and his wife are sent to a copper-mining town in Mexico to set up a prefabricated iron church.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Wonderful...utterly engaging, full of adventure and excess, and 130 degrees in the shade."
-- Washington Post Book World
In the 1890s, "Lower California" is a land adrift, peopled by Indians and half-breeds, and now by the French as well. The Indians are indifferent to Western notions of time and industry The French, on the other hand, are sufficiently meticulous to import 2,348 pieces of cast iron to the desolate mining town of Santa Sofia, there to be assembled into a church under the supervision of a disciple of the renowned Gustave Eiffel.
This wildly impractical venture is the starting premise for this new novel by the author of The Five Gates of Hell, a writer the Washington Post has called "a virtuoso of the hallucinatory." As Theophile Valence attempts to re-create Paris in an outpost of hell -- and his wife, Suzanne, arouses the doomed passions of an American prospector anti a Mexican army officer -- Air & Fire fuses adventure and romance into a magnificent tale of conflicting passions and cultures.
"Absorbing.... More than anything else, it is the prose in which Thomson evokes [his character's] mental life that, with the concentration of a magnifying glass, kindles this novel's fire." -- The New Yorker
"In the tradition of Heart of Darkness, this is a very well-researched novel, with lovely descriptions of flora and fauna, of lava fields and basalt plains, of bats winging about at dusk. Thomson vividly evokes the atmosphere of colonial society." -- New York Newsday
"The brilliance of Air & Fire comes from the intelligence and insight with which Thomson constructs his story." -- Christian Science Monitor
-- Washington Post Book World
In the 1890s, "Lower California" is a land adrift, peopled by Indians and half-breeds, and now by the French as well. The Indians are indifferent to Western notions of time and industry The French, on the other hand, are sufficiently meticulous to import 2,348 pieces of cast iron to the desolate mining town of Santa Sofia, there to be assembled into a church under the supervision of a disciple of the renowned Gustave Eiffel.
This wildly impractical venture is the starting premise for this new novel by the author of The Five Gates of Hell, a writer the Washington Post has called "a virtuoso of the hallucinatory." As Theophile Valence attempts to re-create Paris in an outpost of hell -- and his wife, Suzanne, arouses the doomed passions of an American prospector anti a Mexican army officer -- Air & Fire fuses adventure and romance into a magnificent tale of conflicting passions and cultures.
"Absorbing.... More than anything else, it is the prose in which Thomson evokes [his character's] mental life that, with the concentration of a magnifying glass, kindles this novel's fire." -- The New Yorker
"In the tradition of Heart of Darkness, this is a very well-researched novel, with lovely descriptions of flora and fauna, of lava fields and basalt plains, of bats winging about at dusk. Thomson vividly evokes the atmosphere of colonial society." -- New York Newsday
"The brilliance of Air & Fire comes from the intelligence and insight with which Thomson constructs his story." -- Christian Science Monitor
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another great novel by Thomson,
By
This review is from: Air & Fire: A Novel (Paperback)
I guess I'm always expecting disappointment when I read a book I love and then go find another by the same author. "Dreams of Leaving" was an amazingly good read, but I'd never heard of this guy otherwise, got that one remaindered in fact, so it must have been a flash in the pan, I thought. Not so, I'm happy to say! Maybe he's better known in Britain but I can't imagine why they're not crying his name from the bell towers here. Great stuff, really solid, "literature" instead of fiction. This is a beautiful, sleepy-sad story of human near-misses: a marriage that doesn't quite gel, a mix of cultures that fractures under stress, failures in understanding based in both sex and class, a son pondering the meaning of his father's failures without knowing if there really is a moral to the story of his life. The strength of the novel lies not only in the poignancy in which these misses and their consequences are recorded, but in the sustained hope that lives beside the despair: the Mexican baker who finally masters the art of making baguettes on the day of the riots, etc. Highly recommended!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sheer Brilliance,
By "alan_jen" (Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Air & Fire: A Novel (Paperback)
My initial thoughts on this novel were not of the immediate love of his other books, but as a fan of Rupert Thomson, I couldn't bear to leave it. And I'm awefully glad I didn't. This book sets emotion and senses running, it truely encapsulates the sensation of early Mexico and the lives that were a part of it. This is certainly one of Thomson's best, masterfully written and extraordinarily researched novel. The book follows the lives of two quite different young people who find themselves in Santa Sofia at the same time. It is a delightful yet gruesome tale of the events surround the town and these two lives. It's a tale of falling in and out of love and the confusion of lives lived in a small town of different races and classes. This is truely a brilliant piece of art work...
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a great surprise,
This review is from: Air & Fire: A Novel (Paperback)
picked this up randomly... what could have been a standard "trashy" romance is instead a wonderfully written, at times dreamy-like and poetic study of the nature of love.
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