The Virgin of Flames (Paperback)

by Chris Abani (Author) "This is the religion of cities..." (more)
Key Phrases: Sweet Girl, The Ugly Store, Cop One (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (January 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014303877X
• ISBN-13: 978-0143038771
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #466,532 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tale of Becoming in the Great American City, February 13, 2007

By	Sarah Valentine - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Purpose of Art, February 8, 2007

By	Rachel Hoffman - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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?

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, Enlightening and Entertaining, February 21, 2007

By	Tony Donahoe (Boulder, Colorado) - See all my reviews

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.