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: #417193 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-30
• 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

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

Customer Reviews

Ambivalence is the heart of this Town
I can confidently echo for you the praise the other reviewers on this page have granted The Virgin of Flames. It is the lyrical, grotesque, ecstatic, outcast story of a Los Angeles that simmers unknown to many of it's own citizens-migrants and natives alike. Chris Abani's imagery of Black, Iggy, Sweet Girl, Bomboy, Ray-Ray, Rio L.A. and East L.A., among others is quite reverential and even more than the pictures and qualities he conjures, they are brave.
As a resident of L.A. and it's environs I enjoyed those references to neighborhoods (yes, L.A. has neighborhoods), bridges, restaurants (Thai Palms-Thai Elvis) and the like that told me Mr. Abani walks these places and sees the faces and grafitti, decay and sublime magnetism that propels many of us here. He captures the mystery and possibility of Los Angeles in the radical expressionism of Black's identity experimentation, Iggy's underground venues and physical risk, Sweet Girl's bold sexuality and paralyzing trans/pro-gression. As well, the Catholic blood that run through the dusty past of Los Angeles and California, the WEST, in all it's harrowing, piercing pain. Abani's vision of a modern martyr, his many attempts at acceptance and expression reminded me of Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. The artist living his life as a work of art, challenging the dominate modes through as many of his avenues of existence as possible.
Some favorite passages:
"It seemed, though, that those with a clear sense of the past, of identity, were always so eager to bury it and move on, to reinvent themselves. What a luxury, he thought, what a thing, to choose your own obsession, to choose your own suffering. Him, he was trying to reinvent an origin to bury so he could finally come into this thing he wanted to be, and he knew that if he didn't find it soon, it would destroy him, burn him up." (pgs. 123-24)
"This River was alive, this River was here before anyone knew this was a River, before anyone saw it and said, River. And its personality shaped this city. Was this city." (pg. 135)
Referring to the L.A. Mission, downtown: "It had long since lost out to Six Flags fun parks and Universal Studio's theme park. It looked sad, not in the way of a rejected wallflower, but more in the commonplace shame of a community center. A place kept open by a grudging love." (pg. 155)
Mr. Abani expresses one of the prime enigma's of Los Angeles life: "In LA we are always becoming, and any idea of a solid past, as an anchor, is soon lost here. And I mean any, that's why there is no common mythology here, that's why people come here, to get lost or to be discovered, makes no difference. It's the same coin. Other cities, like New York, have an overwhelming myth, and there is no you, as it were, without this-shall we say-New York state of mind. But here, there is none of that bulls**t, there is just you and what you see and imagine this place and your life in it to be, moment by moment. If you can't change, if you don't embrace it, you destroy yourself. The only landscape in this city is in your mind. It's very Zen..." (pg. 207)
"Ambivalence is the heart of this town. Not in spite of, but because of." (pg. 207)

I look forward to reading more of Mr. Abani's works.

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.

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.