Customer Reviews

The Virgin of Flames

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4 star:		(1)
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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 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?

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.

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.

this book was extremely hard for me to get into at first, but after graceland, and sitting in a chris abani lecture i had faith in where he would take me and i followed thru. the ending was superb. very well done. chris abani is a literary genius in a repressive stone age. black, alas i knew him well, he is me.

This was a great read, start to finish. Daring and unexpected. Highly recommended.