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Christopher Abani
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The Virgin of Flames: A Novel Paperback – January 30, 2007

by Chris Abani (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 31 ratings
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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.

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  1. Print length
    304 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    January 30, 2007
  4. Dimensions
    0.81 x 5.16 x 7.74 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    014303877X
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0143038771
  7. See all details
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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.)
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

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Publishing Group; 1st Pub in USA By Penguin Bks 2007 edition (January 30, 2007)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 014303877X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143038771
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.7 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.81 x 5.16 x 7.74 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 31 ratings

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Christopher Abani

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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
31 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

rh
5.0 out of 5 stars The Purpose of Art
Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2007
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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?
11 people found this helpful
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Echezona Udeze
4.0 out of 5 stars A GOOD read ... well worth it!!!
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2014
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I enjoyed this book though I was expecting a bit more from it ... Like with his other books he has an amazing eye for what is beautiful and for realistic yet fantastic plotting but everything ends too quickly and I am not appeased and cured of the question that has been plaguing me while reading his books ... The characters are interesting and the situation is intriguing but I wish this were longer ... I do not want him to drag out the conflict but I want a conclusion that solves the mystery laid out.
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Bryan Perry
4.0 out of 5 stars The Virgin of Flames
Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2014
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This novel by Chris Abani is one of the most powerful literary masterpieces I have ever experienced. It is a rich mixture of questions and answers that are questions within themselves. If Abani had not been a writer, he'd surely have been a painter! A great read and not one to be taken lightly.
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Velia Tome'
5.0 out of 5 stars The Virgin of Flames
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2014
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Incredibly intense, very original story, full of extremely "flawed" people, unforgettable characters that evoke strong felings ranging from disbelief, to sorrow, to disgust and to anger.
The story is very odd, describing areas of Los Angeles that are anything but glamorous, populated by tormented people.
The author hints at memories of horrendous abuse, but he does not dwell on it and in so doing, his characters become "transhumans."
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BowedBookshelf
5.0 out of 5 stars Unforgettable look at L.A. and its populace
Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2016
This novel by Chris Abani is the literary equivalent of a Diane Arbus photograph—unsettling, terrible, grotesque, yet artistic. In the strange underbelly of the City of Angels Abani finds a kind of hope that describes something in human nature. His dreams, his attempts to “attend his ghosts,” are difficult to look at, but of all the people we might choose to illuminate the depths of human natures, Abani is among the most courageous and compassionate.

Ambiguous sexuality and race, death and desire, religiosity and uncertain faith are themes Abani returns to again and again in his writing. His main character, Black, is conflicted about his desires, and his confusion leads him to seek out those who have made unconventional choices, in hopes they will illuminate the path.

Black is an artist, a painter, but not for money. He paints murals on the sides of buildings, a type of large-scale graffiti requiring long hours hanging from pulleys and ropes. One of the more significant artworks Black had created is a huge mural of graffiti copied from the walls of men’s washrooms around the country. Entitled “American Gothic—The Remix,” the sexist, racist, religionist trash etched into bathroom stalls convey a particular wasteland of the psyche. Those phrases are interspersed with lines from renowned poets, shocking in their clarity and beauty when paired with filth.

In the City of Angels, Black is plagued by the Archangel Gabriel, who sometimes appears as a huge human figure, or otherwise as a pigeon. The appearance of the Archangel Gabriel and the Christian iconography and ideography shouldn’t surprise us: Abani was educated in a seminary in his youth, and thought he might want to be a priest. However, the Christian themes are dislocating in the context of a searching sexuality and Black’s painting of a fifty-foot veiled Muslim Virgin [Mary] on a building near a train tracks. Abani is reminding us that Islamic texts have recorded the Angel Gabriel appearing to prophets conveying news of the Annunciation or the incarnation of Christ, just as in early Jewish and Christian texts, showing commonalities these religions once enjoyed.

Many comments, observations, and philosophies expounded by the characters in this novel are in the record of Abani’s interviews. His background as a half-white Nigerian who initially moved to London and then to the United States has made him uniquely able to describe the experience of Black, as “going through several identities, taking on different ethnic and national affiliations as though they were seasonal changes in wardrobe, and discarding them just as easily.” Black’s friend, the “butcher-boy” from Rwanda called Bomboy, also seeks new identities, new documents, new names—furtively, on street corners out of sight of the police, in the no-man’s-land of east L.A., where the cops and emergency services rarely respond to calls for help.

When Black discovers that men can “become” women with some genital fiddling, his sexual liberation is complete. Whiteface and a blond wig allow him to escape his race. In a stolen wedding dress drenched in blood and turpentine, Black accidentally becomes an emblem—a horrible and disgraceful emblem—of desire, of a perverted hope. The finale of the book is classic L.A.: <a class="jsShowSpoiler spoilerAction">(view spoiler)</a><span class="spoilerContainer" style="display: none">[the Virgin Mary appears hovering above the city in a virtual “snowstorm,” to the sound of trumpets, lit from above, flames licking her white dress, adored by a crowd of the poor, the lame, and the lonely. <a class="jsHideSpoiler spoilerAction">(hide spoiler)</a>]</span>
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