Air and Fire

by Rupert Thomson

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679425063
• ISBN13: 9780679425069
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.7" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

a magic world

Gore Vidal once said the novelist's job is to create a world.Thomson certainly does that here. His 1890s Baja California is a microcosm of race and class and climate and culture. It is a love story, but like all good love stories it puts you there and makes you feel how love is: like hypnosis, like drugs.As always, Thomson's prose is iridescent. Things jump into life in his prose. Also as always, he treats the dark and harsh things of life with loving detail and great humor.

Sheer Brilliance

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...

Another great novel by Thomson

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!

This book makes you think of the two elements,fire,and air.

This book was amazing, due to I needing information about fire for a report. I would reccomed this book if you are needing information about fire and/or air.

a great surprise

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.