Customer Reviews

The Flowers

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I picked up this book in San Francisco after hearing the author read an excerpt. I was moved by Dagoberto Gilb's spoken word. His prose in print was very much as his natural speaking voice--deliberate, honest and direct. I loved this book! I loved his use of colors, sounds and texture. I loved his choice of words, language (English, Spanglish, Spanish and French) and silence. I loved how he painted a real picture of society. The Flowers, is a bouquet of class, race, age and gender and the problems that connect and disconnect us.

Don't be confused by Sonny's thoughts that are infused with shapes that bounce and blend into different shades. Dagoberto Gilb uses Sonny Bravo's synesthesia to paint a world of colors that clash, combine and enlighten. This is the first novel that I read where synesthesia seems to take on a character form by interacting with the sounds of the city and the people, the emotions of a young man experiencing love, lust and displacement, and the feelings of anger, justice and fear. This book is not about black and white, it is dark and gray with rays of a piercing white light that encompasses all colors and feelings of hope, happiness and opportunity.

An added bonus: If you don't have synesthesia, you will definitely get an insight of how one senses shapes and colors in the frontal lobe area. Trust me, it is not something brought on by the use of psychedelic drugs.

The heart of the story's in that opening scene, where the protagonist, 15-year-old (or thereabouts) Sonny Bravo must face sexy and sometimes larcenous mother's irate suitor/employer, pissed 'cos mom's ripped him off, who comes kicking down the front door of Sonny's house, overpowering the kid, kicking his dog and injuring him with his own butcher knife. The tornadoes stirred up in Mother's wake continue to blow through young Sonny's life, landing him a role as stepson to an Okie yokel named Cloyd, whom mother, in her haste to escape earlier consequences, it is implied, has married. Cloyd owns the small apartment complex after which the novel is named, the FLowers.

There's a kind of circular plot at work here. Like a hot southern cal wind spreading wildfires, it blows through that opening, spreading it first into the surrounding apartments at the Flowers, where other fires burn, fires of hateful racial prejudice, fires of sad, wasted girls pining lonely in night-time rooms, fires of adolescent sex-urge, of a youth's own moral conflicts and misplaced violence. These smaller personal fires then reach toward the city beyond, and finally even into history, as the fictional events here begin to resemble the actual, eg., the start of the '65 riots in LA.

Does the Flowers pay homage to Jean Genet? Dished out in the narrative voice of a broken home kid who, strangely enough, is trying to learn French. Notre dame des fleurs...Our Lady de las Flores. The Flowers. Read it.

This novel narrated by Sonny Bravo, a wise and deep thinking fifteen year-old boy, reveals a story from a city where prejudice is intense not just between the white against black, but also the brown. When Sonny's mother, Silvia, suddenly marries the Okie building contractor, Cloyd Longpre, mother and son are uprooted to a small apartment building, where as Sonny sweeps its sidewalks, he meets his neighbors and becomes caught up in their lives. This cast of characters takes Sonny into the worlds of eighteen-year-old Cindy, who's boring marriage gives her an excuse to dose; then there is Nica, a the sheltered Mexican girl who care takes her infant brother but is a prisoner to her apartment. The other tenants range an albino black man named Pink, who sells old cars in front of the building, to Bud, a iron-pumping construction worker, whose prejudice is outward despite his marriage to a Mexican-American woman. Within the stories contained in this novel, narrated to us by Sonny, we are exposed to Gilb's most powerful work yet. Sonny's experiences transcend age, race, and time to reveal the fearlessness and wit that make Dagoberto Gilb one of the best voices in America Literature today. This is a book not to be missed.

Sonny Bravo, a flower himself, trying to bloom in the concrete jungle which is home or not, where culture, prejudice and poverty strip life down to its bare roots. An amazing use of language mixed with the dreamy, magical quality of the Latino mastery of image. I couldn't put it down.

If you are growing up or have grown up as an only child in a one-parent household, this story wil be particularly prescient.

Like many, I am a fan of Gilb's earlier books, but I didn't even hear about this one getting published. Why is that? His publisher should do more to promote the Flowers because it might be his best book yet. It is one of the best contemporary novels I've read in years, one I'd love as a movie too. It grabs you from the first lines the narrator Sonny, a boy who is a man or vica versa, tells his story, and it does not let up until you reach the last line. I didn't put it down.

The narrator Sonny is confined to a Los Angeles apartment complex in a neighborhood of the Watts Riots. What's captivating here is that the story is told not from the white or black but from the perspective of a Chicano. There is more to it than that, of course, several stories are being told, and done so dramatically and very poetically. The Hernandez twins are his clowns, though even the laughs have deeper meanings. Gilb's novel is as real and strong as his popular short stories. His work ought to get so much more attention and the Flowers more promotion. We need more from him, I want more!

Dagoberto Gilb is considered to be a leading voice of the Southwest. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, then wandered throughout the Southwest until he made his way to Texas as a young man. While working as a construction worker near the University of Texas of El Paso he had a fateful meeting with his future friend and mentor, Raymond Carver. The rest, as they say, is history. Such is the larger-than-life almost mythical birth of a writer known as Gilb, who looks like actor Armand Assante of Odyssey fame. In Gilb's novel, The Flowers, Sonny Bravo, a high school student, wants to help himself while helping others. This is a coming-of-age story about the triumph of the human spirit.

I don't know whether or not Sonny is a good student in school, but what really stands out is that despite the lack of parental supervision, he wakes up every morning and walks to school. Given his background, and alienation from society, it would have been easy for Sonny to become passive and give up the fight--to drop out of school, but Sonny not only goes to school, he takes on the challenge of teaching himself French. Sonny is bilingual, on his way to becoming trilingual through his independent study. He is an optimistic, forward thinking young man who blocks out the present and yearns for the future. This says a lot about him as a person.

It is his mother Sylvia's obligation to raise her son but she is wrapped up in her own drama, and cannot see beyond her own situation. The Flowers is an intricate study in the abuses of power on the part of various people in Sonny's life beginning with his self-centered mother and his alcoholic new stepfather to a belligerent racist tenant, and an eighteen-year old female drug addict who seduces him.

A good home environment is not available to Sonny. Because his mother refuses to cook, Sonny improvises and adapts, buying his own meals. Sonny will not starve. He is a survivor who values his life.

Sonny falls in love with a teenage tenant who is virtually kept a prisoner in her apartment babysitting her brother and prevented from going to school by her mother and stepfather. By stepping outside of his own situation and helping others, Sonny is able to see beyond himself and avoid the narrow minded point of view of his mother and stepfather.

Dagoberto Gilb has made a huge contribution to American Letters. In addition to The Flowers, he has published one other novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994). Gilb is also a prolific short story writer beginning with Winners on the Pass Line and Other Stories (1985). His second collection is the award-winning The Magic of Blood (1993), Woodcuts of Women (2001) and most recently, Before the End, After the Beginning (2011). His collection of nonfiction essays Gritos (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and the anthology, Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature (2006) winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award is assigned as a text in high school and college campuses across the United States.

If you enjoy the true-to-life realism of Stephen Crane and Raymond Carver, Dagoberto Gilb is the contemporary writer for you. Gilb writes without melodrama or sentimentality, he is generous enough to let the reader draw their own conclusions.