Product Description

From the author of the award-winning GraceLand comes a searing, dazzlingly written novel of a tarnished City of Angels

Praised as "singular" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) and "extraordinary" (The New York Times Book Review), GraceLand stunned critics and instantly established Chris Abani as an exciting new voice in fiction. In his second novel, set against the uncompromising landscape of East L.A., Abani follows a struggling artist named Black, whose life and friendships reveal a world far removed from the mainstream. Through Black’s journey of self- discovery, Abani raises essential questions about poverty, religion, and ethnicity in America today. The Virgin of Flames, a marvelous and gritty novel filled with indelible images and unforgettable characters, confirms Chris Abani as an immensely talented writer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #401138 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
An L.A. artist's search for identity forms the core of the diffuse but haunting new novel by Nigerian-born poet and Graceland novelist Abani. Black is a 36-year-old muralist living hand to mouth behind the Ugly Store cafe in a bleak area of L.A. He's depressed and in an existential rut: engrossed in his latest work drawing on Catholic iconography (beaten into him as a child by his Salvadoran mother), and still smarting from the disappearance when he was a child of his African father (a NASA engineer) on a Vietnam-era space-related mission, Black feels he's being followed by ghosts—namely, the biblical Gabriel, the angel of annunciation. Sometimes he converses with Gabriel in the spaceship he has constructed in honor of his father above the cafe. Black is also deeply conflicted about his sexuality; a frequenter of female prostitutes, he has recently become obsessed with a local transvestite stripper, Sweet Girl. But Black's malaise may also stem from a curse—involving a malevolent spirit that kills male children—that his father wrote him about. It's a muddle, and it's difficult to care about the plot details. But Abani touches on the far reaches of psychic pain, religious and sexual, and creates a hallucinatory despair. (Jan.)
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From Booklist
By imagining a Nigerian Elvis impersonator in Graceland (2004) and a girl subjected to brutal abuse in Becoming Abigail (2006), Abani has established himself as an unflinching advocate for individuals exiled to society's underside. His latest hallucinatory tale of audaciously improvised lives is set in Los Angeles, a place of epic yearning. As wildfires rage in the hills and ash falls from the sky, mural artist Black seeks transcendence in his work and confronts a long-resisted metamorphosis. The son of an Igbo father and a Salvadoran mother, Black is enthralled by a transvestite stripper named Sweet Girl, entangled with a pragmatic Rwandan refugee, and dependent on a famous psychic and proprietor of a coffee shop-tattoo parlor, where business has been booming ever since the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared on the roof. Redolent of the hunger and doom of Nathanael West, lush and surreal as L.A.'s street murals, and combustible with denied eroticism and thwarted spirituality, Abani's feverish portrait of a haunted artist embodies post-9/11 anxiety and the longing for peace. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
GraceLand amply demonstrates that Abani has the energy, ambition and compassion to create a novel that delineates and illuminates a complicated, dynamic, deeply fractured society. -- Los Angeles Times

Abani . . . has written an exhilarating novel, all the more astonishing for its hard-won grace and, yes, redemption. -- The Village Voice

Abani [is] a fluid, closely observant writer. -- The Washington Post

Abani’s intensely visual style—and his sense of humor—convert the stuff of hopelessness into the stuff of hope. -- San Francisco Chronicle

In depicting how deeply external politics can affect internal thinking, GraceLand announces itself as a worthy heir to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Like that classic of Nigerian literature, it gives a multifaceted, human face to a culture struggling to find its own identity while living with somebody else’s. -- Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Customer Reviews

A Tale of Becoming in the Great American City
In the Virgin of Flames Abani gives us a lyrical, daring portrait of a city and its inhabitants struggling to find their place between darkness and the sublime. Black, a mural artist, is a modern-day Hamlet searching for answers to the riddle of his past, fighting to create a whole from its fragments. This conflict is mirrored in the topography of Los Angeles, where the holy and grotesque combine in a city that reflects the struggles of post-9/11 America. Abani does not provide easy answers to any of this. Instead, he shows us characters that navigate violence and despair but retain the ability to truly care about one another and a city where, despite its urban malaise and constant veil of smoke and ash, people sing joyously in the streets. From its vivid dreamscapes to its gritty realism, Abani's novel will leave the reader breathless at the beauties and complexities of life.

The Purpose of Art
The Virgin of Flames is odd, complex, and accomplished. We find many of Abani's earlier themes: lost, found, and created identities, violent acts and defered release and the consequences of both, surreal consciousness, sublime sexuality and abhorent flesh, choices, imperatives, the absence in the human condition of objectivity - all ignited on the page into an escalated blaze that can keep you up nights. Abani's writing is not for those invested in happy endings. The suicides of his protagonists speed up the inevitability of a death most of us strain to delay. Yet, this is fiction, and, if you give youself over to it, The Virgin of Flames reads as a unique, disquieting voice, an extended prosepoem which will leave you changed. What other is the purpose of art?

Engaging, Enlightening and Entertaining
I can't begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this book. Abani's characters leap from the page. It's a stunning book and I can't wait to go back and read some of Abani's earlier novels.