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The Flowers
Sonny Bravo is a tender, unusually smart fifteen-year-old who is living with his vivacious mother in a large city where intense prejudice is not just white against black, but also brown. When Sonny’s mother, Silvia, suddenly marries an Okie building contractor named Cloyd Longpre, they are uprooted to a small apartment building, Los Flores. As Sonny sweeps its sidewalks, he meets his neighbors and becomes ensnared in their Cindy, an eighteen-year-old druggie who is married and bored; Nica, a cloistered Mexican girl who cares for her infant brother but who is never allowed to leave their unit. The other tenants range from Pink, an albino black man who sells old cars in front of the building, to Bud, a muscled-up construction worker who hates blacks and Mexicans, even while he’s married to a Mexican-American woman. Dagoberto Gilb, in arguably his most powerful work yet, has written an inspiring novel about hate, pain, anger, and love that transcends age, race, and time. Gilb’s novel displays the fearlessness and wit that have helped make him one of this country’s most authentic and original voices.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 3, 2008
About the author
Dagoberto Gilb
33 books37 followersDagoberto Gilb was born in the city of Los Angeles, his mother a Mexican who crossed the border illegally, and his father a Spanish-speaking Anglo raised in East Los Angeles. They divorced before he began kindergarten. He attended several junior colleges until he transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied philosophy and religion and graduated with both bachelor'
s and master's degrees. After that, he began his life as a construction worker, migrating back and forth from Los Angeles and El Paso. A father, he eventually joined the union in Los Angeles; a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, he became a class-A journeyman carpenter, and his employment for the next twelve years was on high-rise buildings.
s and master's degrees. After that, he began his life as a construction worker, migrating back and forth from Los Angeles and El Paso. A father, he eventually joined the union in Los Angeles; a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, he became a class-A journeyman carpenter, and his employment for the next twelve years was on high-rise buildings.
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October 31, 2009
this lyrical and bewitching novel follows a shortish span of time (time, just like other such details, is elusive in this novel, so you don’t quite know for sure in what period it is set and how much time it covers) in the life of sonny bravo, a young chicano teen. at first he lives with his mother, a woman who has little interest in her son and a lot of interest in going out and, presumably, in men. since the story is told from sonny's point of view, we get only what he chooses to tell us, and what he chooses to tell us has a lot to do with what interests him. what his mother does when she goes out is not of much interest to him, so we never quite learn, though we can easily surmise.
soon after the beginning of the novel, though, silvia marries an anglo man and they move into a mainly latino neighborhood in which cloyd owns (according to sonny; he may just be the manager) one or more apartment buildings. cloyd is none too pleasant to either silvia or sonny, and sonny doesn't quite understand why his mother chose to be with him, but, again, he's not the inquisitive kind. he prefers to carve a niche for himself, fashion an inner world he can comfortably inhabit, and make himself as inconspicuous as possible.
since cloyd insists on sonny's pulling his weight, he starts looking after the apartment building where they live, Los Flores, which gives the novel its title. his duties are simple and straightforward, and he fulfills them willingly and diligently.
the enormous charm of this novel is that we get to spend all this time in sonny's head. he's as sunny as his name says, and finds all sorts of ways to keep himself entertained and fascinated. he enjoys spending time in the room that has been given to him for his own personal use (he never refers to it as “his” room), where sounds from inside the house and the outside world wash over him in synesthetic kaleidoscopes of shapes and colors. he keeps well out of his mother's and cloyd's life, especially because cloyd has a lot of hunting rifles in his office and quite a few hunting trophies, and sonny is extremely worried he might be given deer meat to eat.
soon he eats all his meals in a nearby mexican restaurant cum bowling alley whose main specialty is hamburgers doused with jalapenos and chocolate milkshakes (one of the many nods to The Catcher in the Rye). the owners of the restaurant, a friendly and generous woman and her silent husband, develop a protective attitude toward sonny, their youngest customer and the only one ever to use the bowling alley. The restaurant is meaningfully called Alley Cats.
the plot of The Flowers devolves pretty much the same way the plot of The Catcher in the Rye does, led by the peculiar intensity kids bring to their lives with the stories and fantasies they use to enrich them. gilb gives a rich sense of the way in which small things, like his continuing quest to improve his bowling score, absorb and occupy sonny's mind.
sonny is quite content to spend his days walking to and from school with twins he's made friends with and who are both extremely nerdy and extremely hilarious, eating at the Alley Cats, hanging in his room, and, especially, sweeping to a fault the cement pathways of his apartment building. he believes his stay at Los Flores will be short lived and feels no motivation whatsoever to make friends or root himself in his house or his neighborhood. underneath the thin ice of sonny's simplicity and ease lie, however, the monsters of child neglect, displacement, and fear.
by tooling around the building, sonny gets to know all its tenants. it seems that everyone likes and wants sonny, whether as a lover (one of the building tenants, a teenager like him who prematurely married, deflowers him), as a companion, as a friend, or as a taunt. the relationships that flourish (impossible to stay away from flower metaphors!) around sonny are the main delight of the novel, mostly because sonny is for the most part a passive elements of them, self-contained as he is, and the readers cannot but bask in the fact that so many people pursue him.
even though sonny is super charming, gilb does not romanticize him. he mostly wants to stay out of everyone's hair and keep to himself. the only person he actively seeks out is a young recently-immigrated mexican girl whom he falls in love with. the love between these two is entirely endearing and sweet.
at the end the city of los angeles, where the novel takes place, explodes into rioting, giving outward shape to the misery and violence that is the heart of sonny's life.
gilb's use of language (lots of it vernacular, as the novel is narrated by sonny) is fabulous and some passages are stunningly beautiful in their lyricality and humor. gilb deals with race, sexuality, and the pain of children – all hefty themes – with exquisite grace and lighteness. i thank the folks of Literary Fiction by People of Color and william in particular for this lovely find.
here're two passage i marked out for their exemplariness:
"It was either Victory or Victors Auto Wrecker, couldn't tell which because the last letter was missing. The weeds that grew in those cracks of the asphalt or in those dirt patches were dying of no circulation and whatever else could happen to them when nobody touched or cared about them -- or of oil maybe soaking their roots and nuts and bolts and beer caps being pounded and crushed into them by tires driving over. No living weeds. Good beer or whatever it really was. I loved being here because I was not being back there."
"I sat as lightweight as I could, and though I couldn't hear much out of the window, not even half as good as from that room I slept in, it was more that I could hear too much everywhere else. Like tires that were too hot and were being cooled by running through cool water on the boulevard. Loud. Too loud. Every defect in tire tread beat on the street like the bass was up too high. A turn left or right cried like it was squeezing the air out of a crow. Radio music broke off like from a metal grinder. People were driving home with groceries, wanting hot dogs or ice creams or bananas or peanut butter or cookies or cereal. People were driving with beer and quaaludes and whites and black beauties, wanting to have sex or watch it or talk about it, and people were snapping at kids in the back seat who were playing and happy, rolling the windows up and down and they were getting yelled at about food they ate or would eat or a toy they could have or lost, and people were driving alone and people were driving with their husbands and wives and they weren't talking to each other, and old people were driving scared, afraid of every turn and stop like they'd never been there before or maybe they'd seen so many things they didn't know what to expect next. People were driving happy, so happy because they were in love and kissing, and people were driving in hungry or out stuffed, leaving La Costera and the pescado or Adriana's and the steak tampiquena or Elizabeth's Bakery and the tres leches cake."
soon after the beginning of the novel, though, silvia marries an anglo man and they move into a mainly latino neighborhood in which cloyd owns (according to sonny; he may just be the manager) one or more apartment buildings. cloyd is none too pleasant to either silvia or sonny, and sonny doesn't quite understand why his mother chose to be with him, but, again, he's not the inquisitive kind. he prefers to carve a niche for himself, fashion an inner world he can comfortably inhabit, and make himself as inconspicuous as possible.
since cloyd insists on sonny's pulling his weight, he starts looking after the apartment building where they live, Los Flores, which gives the novel its title. his duties are simple and straightforward, and he fulfills them willingly and diligently.
the enormous charm of this novel is that we get to spend all this time in sonny's head. he's as sunny as his name says, and finds all sorts of ways to keep himself entertained and fascinated. he enjoys spending time in the room that has been given to him for his own personal use (he never refers to it as “his” room), where sounds from inside the house and the outside world wash over him in synesthetic kaleidoscopes of shapes and colors. he keeps well out of his mother's and cloyd's life, especially because cloyd has a lot of hunting rifles in his office and quite a few hunting trophies, and sonny is extremely worried he might be given deer meat to eat.
soon he eats all his meals in a nearby mexican restaurant cum bowling alley whose main specialty is hamburgers doused with jalapenos and chocolate milkshakes (one of the many nods to The Catcher in the Rye). the owners of the restaurant, a friendly and generous woman and her silent husband, develop a protective attitude toward sonny, their youngest customer and the only one ever to use the bowling alley. The restaurant is meaningfully called Alley Cats.
the plot of The Flowers devolves pretty much the same way the plot of The Catcher in the Rye does, led by the peculiar intensity kids bring to their lives with the stories and fantasies they use to enrich them. gilb gives a rich sense of the way in which small things, like his continuing quest to improve his bowling score, absorb and occupy sonny's mind.
sonny is quite content to spend his days walking to and from school with twins he's made friends with and who are both extremely nerdy and extremely hilarious, eating at the Alley Cats, hanging in his room, and, especially, sweeping to a fault the cement pathways of his apartment building. he believes his stay at Los Flores will be short lived and feels no motivation whatsoever to make friends or root himself in his house or his neighborhood. underneath the thin ice of sonny's simplicity and ease lie, however, the monsters of child neglect, displacement, and fear.
by tooling around the building, sonny gets to know all its tenants. it seems that everyone likes and wants sonny, whether as a lover (one of the building tenants, a teenager like him who prematurely married, deflowers him), as a companion, as a friend, or as a taunt. the relationships that flourish (impossible to stay away from flower metaphors!) around sonny are the main delight of the novel, mostly because sonny is for the most part a passive elements of them, self-contained as he is, and the readers cannot but bask in the fact that so many people pursue him.
even though sonny is super charming, gilb does not romanticize him. he mostly wants to stay out of everyone's hair and keep to himself. the only person he actively seeks out is a young recently-immigrated mexican girl whom he falls in love with. the love between these two is entirely endearing and sweet.
at the end the city of los angeles, where the novel takes place, explodes into rioting, giving outward shape to the misery and violence that is the heart of sonny's life.
gilb's use of language (lots of it vernacular, as the novel is narrated by sonny) is fabulous and some passages are stunningly beautiful in their lyricality and humor. gilb deals with race, sexuality, and the pain of children – all hefty themes – with exquisite grace and lighteness. i thank the folks of Literary Fiction by People of Color and william in particular for this lovely find.
here're two passage i marked out for their exemplariness:
"It was either Victory or Victors Auto Wrecker, couldn't tell which because the last letter was missing. The weeds that grew in those cracks of the asphalt or in those dirt patches were dying of no circulation and whatever else could happen to them when nobody touched or cared about them -- or of oil maybe soaking their roots and nuts and bolts and beer caps being pounded and crushed into them by tires driving over. No living weeds. Good beer or whatever it really was. I loved being here because I was not being back there."
"I sat as lightweight as I could, and though I couldn't hear much out of the window, not even half as good as from that room I slept in, it was more that I could hear too much everywhere else. Like tires that were too hot and were being cooled by running through cool water on the boulevard. Loud. Too loud. Every defect in tire tread beat on the street like the bass was up too high. A turn left or right cried like it was squeezing the air out of a crow. Radio music broke off like from a metal grinder. People were driving home with groceries, wanting hot dogs or ice creams or bananas or peanut butter or cookies or cereal. People were driving with beer and quaaludes and whites and black beauties, wanting to have sex or watch it or talk about it, and people were snapping at kids in the back seat who were playing and happy, rolling the windows up and down and they were getting yelled at about food they ate or would eat or a toy they could have or lost, and people were driving alone and people were driving with their husbands and wives and they weren't talking to each other, and old people were driving scared, afraid of every turn and stop like they'd never been there before or maybe they'd seen so many things they didn't know what to expect next. People were driving happy, so happy because they were in love and kissing, and people were driving in hungry or out stuffed, leaving La Costera and the pescado or Adriana's and the steak tampiquena or Elizabeth's Bakery and the tres leches cake."
March 4, 2013
This may have been one of the most agonizing reads I've ever attempted. I had nothing but difficulty with this book and I finished feeling like I totally missed something but don't know what.
The story should have been great but I could not get past the hazy characters and the constant repetition. Everything. Was. Repeated. All. The. Time.
These people who seemed stoned right out of their heads would say something, another seemingly stoned character would answer, the original character would repeat the answer and the second character would re-repeat the answer...over and over. It would have been comedic had Abbott & Costello been doing it, but everyone in this book did that and they weren't at a frat party and only one of them was actually stoned all the time. All the damned time. Speaking of repetition, our narrator - a 15-year-old Mexican-American kid in the city and I'll get to him in a second - would repeat a word or an idea or a phrase like some sort of mantra until my head burst because I couldn't take another variation on a theme.
So, we've got this kid, this boy who has been raised by his single mother who has riches stashed somewhere because she is always in a new dress and heels. Always. I'm guessing her stash of riches is what leads our brave Sonny to start stealing money? Because he never really explains why he feels compelled to take money other than because it's there. And that is a good enough explanation because he must be a kleptomaniac and just steals for the hell of it. And to buy hamburgers at the bowling joint.
Alright. Fine. We'll just skim over that part. So, Sonny lives in the city in California with just his mom who isn't much of a mom until she gets married to some redneck slumlord. Sonny doesn't speak much Spanish because he's been pretty much assimilated into American culture. And you'd expect a kid like this to be pretty clever, to be fairly with it, to at least exhibit survival skills and street smarts only I think Sonny suffers from some sort of learning disability because the kid cannot pick up a clue if it were given to him, wrapped in a bow and a shiny neon sign pointing at it that says, "CLUE"; this kid is dumb as rocks. He's not supposed to be - the blurb that goes with this book says he's smart. I think the blurb-writer mistook "smart" for "waxes poetic at inopportune moments over random topics that have nothing to do with what is going on" and I can see how that would be brilliant, and all, because he must be this deep-thinker who sees blue tears on crying girls but COME ON! Really, this kid is just dumb as rocks! Completely unaware of every. single. thing. going on around him. He's in love with a lovely immigrant girl brought here by her mother who can't find her papers and her illegal step-father and she's trapped in her apartment watching her baby brother who does nothing at all but sleep. He only ever sleeps. Sleep, sleep, sleep. And the girl can't leave her apartment. Nor can she talk to anyone, even though she does. And she can't iron, apparently.
Oddly, also trapped in another apartment is Cindy, the complex's whore? She sits in her apartment with the blinds drawn but the door open, smoking weed, getting drunk on cheap wine with ginger ale, and seducing 15-year-olds (Sonny) because her evil, drug-dealing husband who keeps knocking her up but she doesn't have a baby, is always working late.
W. T. F. is going on here?
Sonny is stealing porn rags from a neighbor but not doing anything with them. He gives them to his ADHD BFFs who are twins and love anything having to do with sex. Except sex, itself, because they're apparently too nerdy, or something, to get with a girl. Sonny, who has no idea that anything is happening ever (unless there's money lying around), manages to have crazy sex with Cindy, the whore, and tells the twins but doesn't really seem to notice he had sex with a girl even though the twins are very impressed with his conquest. Sonny actually prefers sneaking into Nika's apartment and mooning over her (quietly, so as not to wake the ever-sleeping baby) all the time.
I guess to give him street cred, he's totally aware of some dude that lurks all predator-like in an ugly car; he calls this guy the Sicky. He is aware that the Sicky follows him around and is pretty sure the dude wants to have sex with him. But he doesn't understand when Cindy wants to have sex with him. I don't understand this.
He goes off on these whirlwinds of semi-violence with his favorite rock, Pierre, and curses up a blue streak. But he calls his genitals "down there". What kid does that? He thinks French is hilarious and so learns it in order to laugh because laughing makes him happy. Amazingly, this new trick makes other people laugh, too. He speaks French, they laugh. Like monkeys or something. He's got his racist father-in-law who has hick friends. I'm not sure why The Cloyd married a Mexican woman, but apparently, he likes tacos. And salsa. But not women who use too much toilet paper. Sonny steals from The Cloyd, wants to kill Cloyd's dumbass best friend, and nothing ever comes of any of that.
The end.
No, really, in my head, that is how the book went. I could not believe in any character. None of them seemed real. Well, ok, maybe the old guy that sat in a chair. He was probably the most real. The rest? Not so much.
I'm guessing - totally based on nothing at all but riots and lack of cell phones - that this takes place in the '90's, maybe during the Rodney King riots? Because there's racial tension going on but, of course, Sonny doesn't notice. Because why would he? He's busy with his pet rock, Pierre, and finding lost money and making eyes at Nika.
Gah. I have to stop. I can't think about this book any further because I missed the one big piece that would have made it all make sense.
The story should have been great but I could not get past the hazy characters and the constant repetition. Everything. Was. Repeated. All. The. Time.
These people who seemed stoned right out of their heads would say something, another seemingly stoned character would answer, the original character would repeat the answer and the second character would re-repeat the answer...over and over. It would have been comedic had Abbott & Costello been doing it, but everyone in this book did that and they weren't at a frat party and only one of them was actually stoned all the time. All the damned time. Speaking of repetition, our narrator - a 15-year-old Mexican-American kid in the city and I'll get to him in a second - would repeat a word or an idea or a phrase like some sort of mantra until my head burst because I couldn't take another variation on a theme.
So, we've got this kid, this boy who has been raised by his single mother who has riches stashed somewhere because she is always in a new dress and heels. Always. I'm guessing her stash of riches is what leads our brave Sonny to start stealing money? Because he never really explains why he feels compelled to take money other than because it's there. And that is a good enough explanation because he must be a kleptomaniac and just steals for the hell of it. And to buy hamburgers at the bowling joint.
Alright. Fine. We'll just skim over that part. So, Sonny lives in the city in California with just his mom who isn't much of a mom until she gets married to some redneck slumlord. Sonny doesn't speak much Spanish because he's been pretty much assimilated into American culture. And you'd expect a kid like this to be pretty clever, to be fairly with it, to at least exhibit survival skills and street smarts only I think Sonny suffers from some sort of learning disability because the kid cannot pick up a clue if it were given to him, wrapped in a bow and a shiny neon sign pointing at it that says, "CLUE"; this kid is dumb as rocks. He's not supposed to be - the blurb that goes with this book says he's smart. I think the blurb-writer mistook "smart" for "waxes poetic at inopportune moments over random topics that have nothing to do with what is going on" and I can see how that would be brilliant, and all, because he must be this deep-thinker who sees blue tears on crying girls but COME ON! Really, this kid is just dumb as rocks! Completely unaware of every. single. thing. going on around him. He's in love with a lovely immigrant girl brought here by her mother who can't find her papers and her illegal step-father and she's trapped in her apartment watching her baby brother who does nothing at all but sleep. He only ever sleeps. Sleep, sleep, sleep. And the girl can't leave her apartment. Nor can she talk to anyone, even though she does. And she can't iron, apparently.
Oddly, also trapped in another apartment is Cindy, the complex's whore? She sits in her apartment with the blinds drawn but the door open, smoking weed, getting drunk on cheap wine with ginger ale, and seducing 15-year-olds (Sonny) because her evil, drug-dealing husband who keeps knocking her up but she doesn't have a baby, is always working late.
W. T. F. is going on here?
Sonny is stealing porn rags from a neighbor but not doing anything with them. He gives them to his ADHD BFFs who are twins and love anything having to do with sex. Except sex, itself, because they're apparently too nerdy, or something, to get with a girl. Sonny, who has no idea that anything is happening ever (unless there's money lying around), manages to have crazy sex with Cindy, the whore, and tells the twins but doesn't really seem to notice he had sex with a girl even though the twins are very impressed with his conquest. Sonny actually prefers sneaking into Nika's apartment and mooning over her (quietly, so as not to wake the ever-sleeping baby) all the time.
I guess to give him street cred, he's totally aware of some dude that lurks all predator-like in an ugly car; he calls this guy the Sicky. He is aware that the Sicky follows him around and is pretty sure the dude wants to have sex with him. But he doesn't understand when Cindy wants to have sex with him. I don't understand this.
He goes off on these whirlwinds of semi-violence with his favorite rock, Pierre, and curses up a blue streak. But he calls his genitals "down there". What kid does that? He thinks French is hilarious and so learns it in order to laugh because laughing makes him happy. Amazingly, this new trick makes other people laugh, too. He speaks French, they laugh. Like monkeys or something. He's got his racist father-in-law who has hick friends. I'm not sure why The Cloyd married a Mexican woman, but apparently, he likes tacos. And salsa. But not women who use too much toilet paper. Sonny steals from The Cloyd, wants to kill Cloyd's dumbass best friend, and nothing ever comes of any of that.
The end.
No, really, in my head, that is how the book went. I could not believe in any character. None of them seemed real. Well, ok, maybe the old guy that sat in a chair. He was probably the most real. The rest? Not so much.
I'm guessing - totally based on nothing at all but riots and lack of cell phones - that this takes place in the '90's, maybe during the Rodney King riots? Because there's racial tension going on but, of course, Sonny doesn't notice. Because why would he? He's busy with his pet rock, Pierre, and finding lost money and making eyes at Nika.
Gah. I have to stop. I can't think about this book any further because I missed the one big piece that would have made it all make sense.
May 4, 2009
I was really excited about this book and it was a bit of a letdown. It's the story of a Latino teenager living in a working class, racially charged area of L.A. with a seriously scary stepfather and a very detached mother. He escapes his family life by getting to know the neighbors in the small apartment complex where they live, which is managed by evil stepdad. Sounds great, right? Well, I found the stream of consciousness passages a bit dull, and the very subtle references to the characters' underlying personalities and challenges hard to decipher. For example, I never figured out what his mother was doing exactly on all her dressed-up evening excursions, and I was not that motivated to try. I guess I am a very shallow reader who wants the plot to be up front and center...at least when I am trying to fit in 25 pages before bed after a long day at work!
April 4, 2008
Sonny is a lost boy. He is one of the most inarticulate narrator and protaganist I've ever come across. Every one of his interactions seems fraught with misunderstanding. He is a Mexican who cannot speak proper Spanish, who often cannot remember the right words for things in either English or Spanish. As a result, his conversations with his mother and a set of twins that he reluctantly befriends who do speak Spanish veer back and forth between English and Spanish, often in the same sentence. His internal observations are filled with noise pressing in on him from TVs, radios, his mother and husband arguments, the street, the neighbors' he hears through the walls. Words assualt him and he's constantly trying to shut them out. Words to him are noise he cannot process, and is incapable of using to his own advantage. Empathy is far outside his reach. He's barely able to comprehend what is happening to him day to day, given the conflicted agendas of the adults around him, and the determined effort of all of them to ignore his needs.
After his mother remarries, and moves him to Los Flores, the apartment complex owned by his stepfather, fifteen year old Sonny finds himself forced into relationships with the building's tenants that he is incapable of navigating, from Cindy, the left alone nineteen year old newlywed who wants him to get high and have sex with her, to Mr. Josep, the old man who lived in Spain but then moved to Russia who seems intent on giving Sonny advice he'll not be able to understand. Then there's Nica, a teenager who never leaves her apartment since she's trapped into caring for her baby half-brother. Sonny's crush on Nica is hard to follow up on since she doesn't speak English well enough to understand him, and he doesn't speak Spanish well enough to make it clear to her what he wants. Sonny's solution is to teach himself French, a language neither really understands, that somehow works to convey his growing passion for her.
He cannot make even his most basic needs known to his neglectful mother, who doesn't even notice that he is spending his own money from his own (mostly stolen) stash to feed himself every day. He is mute in the face of his alcoholic, racist and threatening stepfather, who he calls The Cloyd, mute when facing Cloyd's friend and tenant, the equally threatening and racist Bud. Pink, another neighbor who is an albino, has his own agenda to pursue with Sonny, but his way of expressing that is also as clear as mud. Sonny is at home nowhere, and the sense of danger when he's doing something as simple as sitting on the bed in his bedroom assigned to him by his stepfather is ever present. No one is on his side, no one is in his corner, and he doesn't know how to ask anyone to help him.
Set in Los Angeles at the time of the race riots, The Flowers is a meditation on all the ways people of different cultural backgrounds can be living right next door to each other and still be incapable of reaching any kind of accord.
After his mother remarries, and moves him to Los Flores, the apartment complex owned by his stepfather, fifteen year old Sonny finds himself forced into relationships with the building's tenants that he is incapable of navigating, from Cindy, the left alone nineteen year old newlywed who wants him to get high and have sex with her, to Mr. Josep, the old man who lived in Spain but then moved to Russia who seems intent on giving Sonny advice he'll not be able to understand. Then there's Nica, a teenager who never leaves her apartment since she's trapped into caring for her baby half-brother. Sonny's crush on Nica is hard to follow up on since she doesn't speak English well enough to understand him, and he doesn't speak Spanish well enough to make it clear to her what he wants. Sonny's solution is to teach himself French, a language neither really understands, that somehow works to convey his growing passion for her.
He cannot make even his most basic needs known to his neglectful mother, who doesn't even notice that he is spending his own money from his own (mostly stolen) stash to feed himself every day. He is mute in the face of his alcoholic, racist and threatening stepfather, who he calls The Cloyd, mute when facing Cloyd's friend and tenant, the equally threatening and racist Bud. Pink, another neighbor who is an albino, has his own agenda to pursue with Sonny, but his way of expressing that is also as clear as mud. Sonny is at home nowhere, and the sense of danger when he's doing something as simple as sitting on the bed in his bedroom assigned to him by his stepfather is ever present. No one is on his side, no one is in his corner, and he doesn't know how to ask anyone to help him.
Set in Los Angeles at the time of the race riots, The Flowers is a meditation on all the ways people of different cultural backgrounds can be living right next door to each other and still be incapable of reaching any kind of accord.
Read
February 10, 2009When Sonny Bravo Met Holden Caulfield (from http://www.identitytheory.com/bookblo...)
Spurred by what one critic said of Dagoberto Gilb's The Flowers (that its narrator Sonny Bravo could be Holden Caulfield), I read The Flowers then reread Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The narrators do share the word "phony," it's true. Rather than interchange them, I'd like to see them meet.
*
Loved this book as much as the first. Plus, its attention to race and place and the book's culminating incinerations reminds me of
the place I call home--its racial strife, the elbowing for escape--the angst and atrophy, the strange humility, the humor!, and when we least expect it, grace.
I dare you not to laugh at his twins or feel something like heartache by book-end for the narrator and his mother. And when you're finished with this story, run to your fave library or book store and read pages 75-88 of Gritos, Gilbs 2003 essays. Right there on page 88, the best last line in literature.
Spurred by what one critic said of Dagoberto Gilb's The Flowers (that its narrator Sonny Bravo could be Holden Caulfield), I read The Flowers then reread Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The narrators do share the word "phony," it's true. Rather than interchange them, I'd like to see them meet.
*
Loved this book as much as the first. Plus, its attention to race and place and the book's culminating incinerations reminds me of
the place I call home--its racial strife, the elbowing for escape--the angst and atrophy, the strange humility, the humor!, and when we least expect it, grace.
I dare you not to laugh at his twins or feel something like heartache by book-end for the narrator and his mother. And when you're finished with this story, run to your fave library or book store and read pages 75-88 of Gritos, Gilbs 2003 essays. Right there on page 88, the best last line in literature.
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November 7, 2009I got an early copy of this book. It is scheduled for release later in February.
This is Gilb's first novel, I think. The rest of his work being short story collections and essays. His slim volume is packed with his always ferocious, yet surprisingly tender energy. In this case, we follow a lonely young man (pre-adolescent? it's unclear) who discovers the lives of others when he moves into a small apartment complex in LA. I've barely started the novel. I think what moves me is how sweet and sour it is at once. Gilb has a real ear for spoken language, so it just sings from the page. And while the kid talk is sometimes salty, precocious, and jaded, it belies a vulnerability that makes you want to wrap this kid up and take him to France -- you'll get that once you read the book....which I highly recommend when it comes out.
Gilb has a lengthy book took following the release of The Flowers. If I can find the itinerary, I'll post. In person, Gilb is a formidable presence.
This is Gilb's first novel, I think. The rest of his work being short story collections and essays. His slim volume is packed with his always ferocious, yet surprisingly tender energy. In this case, we follow a lonely young man (pre-adolescent? it's unclear) who discovers the lives of others when he moves into a small apartment complex in LA. I've barely started the novel. I think what moves me is how sweet and sour it is at once. Gilb has a real ear for spoken language, so it just sings from the page. And while the kid talk is sometimes salty, precocious, and jaded, it belies a vulnerability that makes you want to wrap this kid up and take him to France -- you'll get that once you read the book....which I highly recommend when it comes out.
Gilb has a lengthy book took following the release of The Flowers. If I can find the itinerary, I'll post. In person, Gilb is a formidable presence.
October 18, 2016
I loved this book. It's gritty. It's multi-cultural. It's far from the childhood I had in many ways.
I love how Sonny, the main character, lives two and then three languages. I love how there's a stream of consciousness going through the dialogue, Sonny's thoughts, and even the timeline (it's hard to determine how many days, weeks or whatever spans the novel). At first, it was a bit confusing, but when you get into the story, the style really works well.
If you are Latino/a, or have interest in Mexican culture, read this book.
I love how Sonny, the main character, lives two and then three languages. I love how there's a stream of consciousness going through the dialogue, Sonny's thoughts, and even the timeline (it's hard to determine how many days, weeks or whatever spans the novel). At first, it was a bit confusing, but when you get into the story, the style really works well.
If you are Latino/a, or have interest in Mexican culture, read this book.
September 8, 2011
The NY Times review said, "The prospect of reading a novel narrated in run-on sentences, fragments, Spanish phrases, and street slang might seem daunting," and then goes on to say, basically, but not when you read this book. Well, truthfully, I found it daunting when I read this book, too. The story is good and the picture it presents of a Mexican kid growing up in LA is, I presume, very real, but the above mentioned things wore on me some.
August 6, 2008
His world is one I haven't lived in, but I have met some of his characters. I liked the stream of conscious feel of the book.
December 27, 2011
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/...
Dagoberto Gilb’s “The Flowers”
By Jenny Shank, 2-22-08
The Flowers
by Dagoberto Gilb
Grove Press
250 pages, $24
With his new novel The Flowers, Austin-based Dagoberto Gilb has written his most powerful book to date, digging his hands into the fraught subject of race relations, but doing so in his signature humorous, meandering, natural way that makes him such a winning chronicler of Western urban life. Although Gilb’s story alights on all kinds of touchy topics—racism, illegal immigration, women’s roles, sex, and drugs—he never lectures. Instead, he creates a complex tableau of humanity that allows readers a fascinating glimpse into the sort of lives they may have wondered about. Gilb’s narrator, a 15-year-old Mexican-American named Sonny Bravo, speaks in a distinctive patois that mixes in the lax English grammar of teenagers ("anyways"), Spanish ("Qué guapo es my little man!"), and even some French, which Sonny is studying as a lark. The result is an inventive language that sounds like that of today’s YouTubed American youth.
As The Flowers begins, with Sonny describing his habitual thievery and his unmarried mother’s romantic troubles that spill over into his life, it’s hard to tell where the story heading, but it’s so entertaining, peopled with such colorful characters, that you don’t care if it’s going to go anywhere or not. I had settled into enjoy the book as I did Gilb’s first novel, 1994’s The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, expecting great set pieces and description, but no real pyrotechnics out of the plot, but the plot of The Flowers becomes increasingly gripping and does provide fireworks before the end.
After a string of bad boyfriends, one of whom attacked Sonny, Sonny’s beautiful mom, Sylvia, decides to marry a white guy named Cloyd Longpre (whom Sonny comes to refer to as “The Cloyd"), a man who takes pride in displaying the mounted heads of animals he’s shot. Sonny suffers from half-neglect ("…my mom, if she wasn’t at her job, was out on dates and whatever"), and has grown accustomed to making his own dinner and keeping his own company.
But with his mom’s marriage to The Cloyd, Sonny is uprooted to Los Flores, the apartment building that Longpre manages. (As Sonny figures out, it should properly be called “Las Flores,” and this funny detail reminded me of a character in a novel the protagonist of Mickey Acuña reads, who is misnamed Consuela instead of Consuelo.) Sonny’s mom begins to cook a little, something she’s never done before, and Sonny is expected to perform chores around the building, such as sweeping, painting, and taking out trash. He does the tasks biddably, with the sort of ironic “yes sir” show of respect to Longpre that teenagers so delight in.
Just as Mickey Acuña focused on the daily life of the inhabitants of a YMCA, much of the action in The Flowers centers around the mundane activities of the residents of Los Flores. Except that they turn out to not be so mundane. From Pink, a jive-talking used car salesman who is rumored to be an albino African-American, to the nerdish Mexican-American twins that Sonny befriends at school, to Nica, an innocent Mexican immigrant girl whose parents don’t allow to attend school or leave the apartment, each of Gilb’s characters are vivid and fresh.
Gilb’s narrators remind me of a more macho version of Baudelaire’s flâneur, a “gentleman stroller of city streets,” taking his time, observing the people around him. But in The Flowers, simmering tensions in the community and myriad temptations (such as a scantily clad young wife named Cindy who is bored at home and seeks Sonny’s attentions, and money that Sonny discovers in Longpre’s office) draw Sonny out of his observer stance and cause him to take decisive action.
Gilb’s off-kilter humor is a key delight of The Flowers, demonstrating a perspective that is youthful enough to be believably that of a 15-year-old boy, but also a wisdom beyond Sonny’s years. In once scene, Sonny explains why he starts buying his meals at a nearby bowling alley rather than eat at home. “I hated deer meat and will always hate deer meat. Cloyd food. Another time was fish. I pretended to get sick on that, which in a way wasn’t hard because this fish had an eye staring up at me from the plate. Like the deer, he killed it, it was his--he was proud of that kind of shit.”
Gilb’s descriptions of urban life are visceral and evocative. Toward the end of the book, there’s one very long, virtuosic paragraph that records Sonny’s impressions of the passing traffic in a panoramic way. It’s hard to convey its rhythm with a short excerpt, but here’s a snippet:
“People were driving home with groceries, wanting hot dogs or ice cream or bananas or peanut butter or cookies or cereal. People were driving with beer and Quaaludes and whites and black beauties, wanting to have sex or watch it or talk about it, and people were snapping at kids in the backseat who were playing and happy, rolling the windows up and down and they were getting yelled at about food they ate or would eat or a toy they could have or lost, and people were driving with their husbands and wives and they weren’t talking to each other, and old people were driving scared, afraid of every turn and stop like they’d never been there before or maybe they’d seen so many things they didn’t know what to expect next.”
As much as I’ve enjoyed Gilb’s prior books, The Flowers tops them all, and represents a big leap forward in Gilb’s artistic growth.
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/...
WESTERN WRITERS
An Interview with Dagoberto Gilb
By Jenny Shank, 4-21-08
Photo by Nancy Crampton.
Dagoberto Gilb grew up in Los Angeles and moved frequently throughout the urban West that he depicts in stories and novels in his characteristic incisive and humorous way. After earning a master’s degree from the University of California, Gilb worked for many years as a construction worker and carpenter in LA and El Paso. Gilb began publishing stories in literary magazines and eventually books, including 1994’s The Magic of Blood, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and 2003’s Gritos, an essay collection that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gilb currently is a professor at Texas State University, and recently published a new novel, The Flowers, which depicts life in an apartment complex as seen by the winning 15-year-old narrator, Sonny Bravo. I interviewed Gilb via email about the quirky characters and organic structure of the novel, and how writing and living in Texas influences his work.
New West You published your first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, in 1994, and since then have written successful essay and story collections. What prompted you to write a new novel?
Dagoberto Gilb: This is my fourth novel, even if it appears to be my second. Nobody needs prompting to write a novel. Maybe some mental and financial counseling and education.
NW: What are the unique challenges of writing a novel as opposed to a collection of shorter pieces?
DG: Some pieces are harder than others. The ones that seem the easiest are usually the hardest. Writers write what they need to write. I love writing short stories and essays too.
NW: The voice of Sonny Bravo is so arresting and inventive, with its humor and multilingual teenage flair. In some ways, it’s similar to the voice you’ve used in other works, but in other ways it’s unique. How did you come up with the way he’d talk?
DG: Never used that voice before. It was the long work of the book, to carry a voice that was as “young” in the past as it might be hearing it now and yet not only.
NW: Sonny decides to teach himself French, and uses French words that he likes the sound of in conversations. Why did you decide to have him do this?
DG: He needs to play. I need to play. He uses it to say, like, focque vous, to make himself smile, to lighten the darkness. For me it’s an inside joke about loving Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet. My frenchez vous to all the internal and external expectations of Mexican American literature to be only about retaining Spanish, and so on. The book, like all Genet’s, is about breaking rules and being confined both, and I tried to break as many rules of expectation, and the rest, as was possible, while maintaining a storyline.
NW: The cast of characters in “The Flowers” is so vivid, from Sonny’s nerdish twin friends, to “The Cloyd,” to Sonny’s beautiful, self-focused mother. How did you create these people?
DG: I say I write from physical experience, not just musings or opinions or prescriptions. That is, I run or get into something and there is, call it, a throbbing. I focus on it and I write about that. The characters resemble people I’ve dreamed, re-invented, re-imagined, re-designed, made mythic in a “realistic” setting. The twins are my comedic Greek chorus. A novel is like a psychic map.
NW: Many writers start out writing from a young person’s perspective, and eventually write more from adult perspectives. If I’m not mistaken, most of your earlier work is from the perspectives of adults, and your most recent book is from the perspective of a teenager. Do you have any thoughts on why you decided to write from a younger perspective at this point in your career?
DG: Sure, Sonny is fifteen years old. But this character is a fictional artifice, just as a woman writer might make her lead character a homosexual man, a male writer a woman in the Weather Underground. I did not intend him to be only fifteen, the book would not be read by anyone fifteen. That is to say, for me there is nothing younger or older in perspective from my work except in terms of the historical time frame of my own life. That is, the point of view of this novel is certainly not younger than any of the writing I did which preceded it.
NW: The structure of “The Flowers” seems pretty organic—the plot arises out of the relationships between the characters, and it doesn’t seem like you rush it. Did you plan out what would happen before you wrote it, or did the story come to you as you were working?
DG: I write to the ending I know, which is where my stories come from. The work is to know where to start and why there.
NW: Why did you decide to have the book culminate in a race riot?
DG: That was toward the ending I knew it was going to. And, I say, where this kind of story has to go.
NW: Some reviews have said that the skirmishes you include in The Flowers were from the L.A. riots of 1992, but you don’t indicate this specifically. Did you have a specific place and time in mind?
DG: The only reviewer who said this was the one in the New York Times Book Review (she also judged me, with equal and more slandering inaccuracy, as a literary “stereotyper” of women, like that, not considering that the male characters have an equivalent set of troubled adjectives, which those who aren’t projecting their own stereotyping prejudice might recognize as the social backdrop of The Flowers). Though it is not brought up in the book for both willful “arty” reasons (maybe dumb!) and also for what I thought was the novel’s internal demand, anyone who’s from Los Angeles neighborhoods would recognize the ‘65 Watts Riot, which it is, and, of course, is not. I didn’t want this to be considered a “historical” novel, so I admit that it weirdly pleases me that it’s not clearly recognized—it’s not necessary to know. Exactly what I wanted, for better or worse.
NW: What was the process of editing Hecho in Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature? Did you have any revelations from what you uncovered to include in the anthology, and are there any pieces that particularly influenced you?
DG: I wrote the long answer to this in its introductory essay, which can be read here.
In the essay, Gilb writes, among other things, about his different responses to the work of Luís Valdez and Rolando Hinojosa: “If Valdez was creating a Califas of archetypes (and sometimes stereotypes), of hip zoot suiters and lowriders, pachucos y las rucas, characters I enjoyed but didn’t feel were like me and my more conflicted, and ordinary American experience, what I found in Hinojosa’s work bled a vein: He was writing about the common people who were cops or menial bank workers, employed at drugstores or who sold cars, went to little league baseball games and told stories of a living Mexico and the smallest cositas of a local community, like death and birth, who married who inside the community and out, much of it related as gossip and through simple conversation in dialogue. It was, in other words, what I recognized, and so, like much else that suddenly changed in my life from that point on, I began to understand the world I was in too, where I was not only as a working man, but as a writer I wanted to be.”
NW: You have traveled all over the country, teaching at various writing programs, and in recent years you’ve been back in Texas, which is one of the states in which you grew up. Is it good for your writing to be in Texas? How does the place where you live affect what you write about?
DG: I have traveled a lot by standards of my childhood peers. I have now taught at a few universities. Much of my life now I have lived in Texas, though many adult years I worked as a construction worker mostly in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised. I think place and work—experience—are a writer’s dyes. For me, these are as important as parents and class and heritage. They set the story and bind the material. I have been a writer from the West, the American Southwest, and, like it or not, it’s who I will probably always be.
Dagoberto Gilb’s “The Flowers”
By Jenny Shank, 2-22-08
The Flowers
by Dagoberto Gilb
Grove Press
250 pages, $24
With his new novel The Flowers, Austin-based Dagoberto Gilb has written his most powerful book to date, digging his hands into the fraught subject of race relations, but doing so in his signature humorous, meandering, natural way that makes him such a winning chronicler of Western urban life. Although Gilb’s story alights on all kinds of touchy topics—racism, illegal immigration, women’s roles, sex, and drugs—he never lectures. Instead, he creates a complex tableau of humanity that allows readers a fascinating glimpse into the sort of lives they may have wondered about. Gilb’s narrator, a 15-year-old Mexican-American named Sonny Bravo, speaks in a distinctive patois that mixes in the lax English grammar of teenagers ("anyways"), Spanish ("Qué guapo es my little man!"), and even some French, which Sonny is studying as a lark. The result is an inventive language that sounds like that of today’s YouTubed American youth.
As The Flowers begins, with Sonny describing his habitual thievery and his unmarried mother’s romantic troubles that spill over into his life, it’s hard to tell where the story heading, but it’s so entertaining, peopled with such colorful characters, that you don’t care if it’s going to go anywhere or not. I had settled into enjoy the book as I did Gilb’s first novel, 1994’s The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, expecting great set pieces and description, but no real pyrotechnics out of the plot, but the plot of The Flowers becomes increasingly gripping and does provide fireworks before the end.
After a string of bad boyfriends, one of whom attacked Sonny, Sonny’s beautiful mom, Sylvia, decides to marry a white guy named Cloyd Longpre (whom Sonny comes to refer to as “The Cloyd"), a man who takes pride in displaying the mounted heads of animals he’s shot. Sonny suffers from half-neglect ("…my mom, if she wasn’t at her job, was out on dates and whatever"), and has grown accustomed to making his own dinner and keeping his own company.
But with his mom’s marriage to The Cloyd, Sonny is uprooted to Los Flores, the apartment building that Longpre manages. (As Sonny figures out, it should properly be called “Las Flores,” and this funny detail reminded me of a character in a novel the protagonist of Mickey Acuña reads, who is misnamed Consuela instead of Consuelo.) Sonny’s mom begins to cook a little, something she’s never done before, and Sonny is expected to perform chores around the building, such as sweeping, painting, and taking out trash. He does the tasks biddably, with the sort of ironic “yes sir” show of respect to Longpre that teenagers so delight in.
Just as Mickey Acuña focused on the daily life of the inhabitants of a YMCA, much of the action in The Flowers centers around the mundane activities of the residents of Los Flores. Except that they turn out to not be so mundane. From Pink, a jive-talking used car salesman who is rumored to be an albino African-American, to the nerdish Mexican-American twins that Sonny befriends at school, to Nica, an innocent Mexican immigrant girl whose parents don’t allow to attend school or leave the apartment, each of Gilb’s characters are vivid and fresh.
Gilb’s narrators remind me of a more macho version of Baudelaire’s flâneur, a “gentleman stroller of city streets,” taking his time, observing the people around him. But in The Flowers, simmering tensions in the community and myriad temptations (such as a scantily clad young wife named Cindy who is bored at home and seeks Sonny’s attentions, and money that Sonny discovers in Longpre’s office) draw Sonny out of his observer stance and cause him to take decisive action.
Gilb’s off-kilter humor is a key delight of The Flowers, demonstrating a perspective that is youthful enough to be believably that of a 15-year-old boy, but also a wisdom beyond Sonny’s years. In once scene, Sonny explains why he starts buying his meals at a nearby bowling alley rather than eat at home. “I hated deer meat and will always hate deer meat. Cloyd food. Another time was fish. I pretended to get sick on that, which in a way wasn’t hard because this fish had an eye staring up at me from the plate. Like the deer, he killed it, it was his--he was proud of that kind of shit.”
Gilb’s descriptions of urban life are visceral and evocative. Toward the end of the book, there’s one very long, virtuosic paragraph that records Sonny’s impressions of the passing traffic in a panoramic way. It’s hard to convey its rhythm with a short excerpt, but here’s a snippet:
“People were driving home with groceries, wanting hot dogs or ice cream or bananas or peanut butter or cookies or cereal. People were driving with beer and Quaaludes and whites and black beauties, wanting to have sex or watch it or talk about it, and people were snapping at kids in the backseat who were playing and happy, rolling the windows up and down and they were getting yelled at about food they ate or would eat or a toy they could have or lost, and people were driving with their husbands and wives and they weren’t talking to each other, and old people were driving scared, afraid of every turn and stop like they’d never been there before or maybe they’d seen so many things they didn’t know what to expect next.”
As much as I’ve enjoyed Gilb’s prior books, The Flowers tops them all, and represents a big leap forward in Gilb’s artistic growth.
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/...
WESTERN WRITERS
An Interview with Dagoberto Gilb
By Jenny Shank, 4-21-08
Photo by Nancy Crampton.
Dagoberto Gilb grew up in Los Angeles and moved frequently throughout the urban West that he depicts in stories and novels in his characteristic incisive and humorous way. After earning a master’s degree from the University of California, Gilb worked for many years as a construction worker and carpenter in LA and El Paso. Gilb began publishing stories in literary magazines and eventually books, including 1994’s The Magic of Blood, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and 2003’s Gritos, an essay collection that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gilb currently is a professor at Texas State University, and recently published a new novel, The Flowers, which depicts life in an apartment complex as seen by the winning 15-year-old narrator, Sonny Bravo. I interviewed Gilb via email about the quirky characters and organic structure of the novel, and how writing and living in Texas influences his work.
New West You published your first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, in 1994, and since then have written successful essay and story collections. What prompted you to write a new novel?
Dagoberto Gilb: This is my fourth novel, even if it appears to be my second. Nobody needs prompting to write a novel. Maybe some mental and financial counseling and education.
NW: What are the unique challenges of writing a novel as opposed to a collection of shorter pieces?
DG: Some pieces are harder than others. The ones that seem the easiest are usually the hardest. Writers write what they need to write. I love writing short stories and essays too.
NW: The voice of Sonny Bravo is so arresting and inventive, with its humor and multilingual teenage flair. In some ways, it’s similar to the voice you’ve used in other works, but in other ways it’s unique. How did you come up with the way he’d talk?
DG: Never used that voice before. It was the long work of the book, to carry a voice that was as “young” in the past as it might be hearing it now and yet not only.
NW: Sonny decides to teach himself French, and uses French words that he likes the sound of in conversations. Why did you decide to have him do this?
DG: He needs to play. I need to play. He uses it to say, like, focque vous, to make himself smile, to lighten the darkness. For me it’s an inside joke about loving Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet. My frenchez vous to all the internal and external expectations of Mexican American literature to be only about retaining Spanish, and so on. The book, like all Genet’s, is about breaking rules and being confined both, and I tried to break as many rules of expectation, and the rest, as was possible, while maintaining a storyline.
NW: The cast of characters in “The Flowers” is so vivid, from Sonny’s nerdish twin friends, to “The Cloyd,” to Sonny’s beautiful, self-focused mother. How did you create these people?
DG: I say I write from physical experience, not just musings or opinions or prescriptions. That is, I run or get into something and there is, call it, a throbbing. I focus on it and I write about that. The characters resemble people I’ve dreamed, re-invented, re-imagined, re-designed, made mythic in a “realistic” setting. The twins are my comedic Greek chorus. A novel is like a psychic map.
NW: Many writers start out writing from a young person’s perspective, and eventually write more from adult perspectives. If I’m not mistaken, most of your earlier work is from the perspectives of adults, and your most recent book is from the perspective of a teenager. Do you have any thoughts on why you decided to write from a younger perspective at this point in your career?
DG: Sure, Sonny is fifteen years old. But this character is a fictional artifice, just as a woman writer might make her lead character a homosexual man, a male writer a woman in the Weather Underground. I did not intend him to be only fifteen, the book would not be read by anyone fifteen. That is to say, for me there is nothing younger or older in perspective from my work except in terms of the historical time frame of my own life. That is, the point of view of this novel is certainly not younger than any of the writing I did which preceded it.
NW: The structure of “The Flowers” seems pretty organic—the plot arises out of the relationships between the characters, and it doesn’t seem like you rush it. Did you plan out what would happen before you wrote it, or did the story come to you as you were working?
DG: I write to the ending I know, which is where my stories come from. The work is to know where to start and why there.
NW: Why did you decide to have the book culminate in a race riot?
DG: That was toward the ending I knew it was going to. And, I say, where this kind of story has to go.
NW: Some reviews have said that the skirmishes you include in The Flowers were from the L.A. riots of 1992, but you don’t indicate this specifically. Did you have a specific place and time in mind?
DG: The only reviewer who said this was the one in the New York Times Book Review (she also judged me, with equal and more slandering inaccuracy, as a literary “stereotyper” of women, like that, not considering that the male characters have an equivalent set of troubled adjectives, which those who aren’t projecting their own stereotyping prejudice might recognize as the social backdrop of The Flowers). Though it is not brought up in the book for both willful “arty” reasons (maybe dumb!) and also for what I thought was the novel’s internal demand, anyone who’s from Los Angeles neighborhoods would recognize the ‘65 Watts Riot, which it is, and, of course, is not. I didn’t want this to be considered a “historical” novel, so I admit that it weirdly pleases me that it’s not clearly recognized—it’s not necessary to know. Exactly what I wanted, for better or worse.
NW: What was the process of editing Hecho in Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature? Did you have any revelations from what you uncovered to include in the anthology, and are there any pieces that particularly influenced you?
DG: I wrote the long answer to this in its introductory essay, which can be read here.
In the essay, Gilb writes, among other things, about his different responses to the work of Luís Valdez and Rolando Hinojosa: “If Valdez was creating a Califas of archetypes (and sometimes stereotypes), of hip zoot suiters and lowriders, pachucos y las rucas, characters I enjoyed but didn’t feel were like me and my more conflicted, and ordinary American experience, what I found in Hinojosa’s work bled a vein: He was writing about the common people who were cops or menial bank workers, employed at drugstores or who sold cars, went to little league baseball games and told stories of a living Mexico and the smallest cositas of a local community, like death and birth, who married who inside the community and out, much of it related as gossip and through simple conversation in dialogue. It was, in other words, what I recognized, and so, like much else that suddenly changed in my life from that point on, I began to understand the world I was in too, where I was not only as a working man, but as a writer I wanted to be.”
NW: You have traveled all over the country, teaching at various writing programs, and in recent years you’ve been back in Texas, which is one of the states in which you grew up. Is it good for your writing to be in Texas? How does the place where you live affect what you write about?
DG: I have traveled a lot by standards of my childhood peers. I have now taught at a few universities. Much of my life now I have lived in Texas, though many adult years I worked as a construction worker mostly in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised. I think place and work—experience—are a writer’s dyes. For me, these are as important as parents and class and heritage. They set the story and bind the material. I have been a writer from the West, the American Southwest, and, like it or not, it’s who I will probably always be.
February 1, 2020
This novel was an assigned read. Genre is modern realism. At the end of the book, you will have a crystal clear understanding of the angst of coming of age in multi-cultural Los Angeles "Catcher in the Rye" for a new generation with new problems.
September 4, 2019
It felt as if I were dropped into the middle of a story and pulled back out before the end. The book is a snapshot of an adolescent boy's life. Some of the characters are interesting but lack depth, in part because there are so many. Long interior monologues confused me. I wasn't sure if they were conscious attempts to escape his tortured reality or some sort of altered state.
September 21, 2014
Gilb’s seventh publication is a successful depiction of Sonny Bravo, a Mexican American high school boy who lives in a city wracked with racial hatred, violence, and sexual scandal. The city, however, is not his only problem; his male-dependent, overly attractive mother has decided to marry an alcoholic who owns “The Flowers”, a lower-class apartment building which houses tenants of various races. The book revolves mostly around Sonny’s interactions with the tenants, also concentrating on how he deals with his own pain, disappointment, and, in some rare cases, happiness regarding other people.
The Flowers’s tenants include Cindy, a lonely married girl of only eighteen; Bud, a racist married man who finds Sonny’s mother attractive and unmanageable; Nica, a high school-aged girl who is kept out of school in order to be the family housekeeper and care for her baby brother; and Pink, an albino who sells used cars illegally. Sonny’s reactions to all of these people and more reveal his insecurities, corrupted understandings of right and wrong, and the psychological damage his mother has done.
Gilb’s book is written in a stream of consciousness fashion that brings the reader into Sonny’s thought processes in a very real and distinctive way. Whether or not the reader has experienced things such as racial profiling and verbal abuse, the style and descriptions of this book allow the reader to feel as if the tense actions and their results are really happening.
The constant action and brutal realism of The Flowers make it a very quick read. Its overall affect makes readers want to bring tolerance to the world around them, thereby giving those who are less fortunate a chance to see the positive side of life.
The Flowers’s tenants include Cindy, a lonely married girl of only eighteen; Bud, a racist married man who finds Sonny’s mother attractive and unmanageable; Nica, a high school-aged girl who is kept out of school in order to be the family housekeeper and care for her baby brother; and Pink, an albino who sells used cars illegally. Sonny’s reactions to all of these people and more reveal his insecurities, corrupted understandings of right and wrong, and the psychological damage his mother has done.
Gilb’s book is written in a stream of consciousness fashion that brings the reader into Sonny’s thought processes in a very real and distinctive way. Whether or not the reader has experienced things such as racial profiling and verbal abuse, the style and descriptions of this book allow the reader to feel as if the tense actions and their results are really happening.
The constant action and brutal realism of The Flowers make it a very quick read. Its overall affect makes readers want to bring tolerance to the world around them, thereby giving those who are less fortunate a chance to see the positive side of life.
August 5, 2008
All in the head of Sonny Bravo, who experiences sounds almost as acutely as Saleem Sinai in Midnight's Children, but in a synesthesic form. Sonny is fifteen, and Mexican-American in a racially mixed but racist-ly charged Los Angeles. His mother marries a white bigot with a rifle collection for the financial security, but Sonny sees the move as only temporary, not bothering to make friends or adjust to his stepfather's apartment as his home. We experience Sonny's small-time criminal activity, breaking into neighborhood homes to see how other people live, stealing candy and magazines, having sex with the married upstairs frustrated housewife, driving without a license, and all the anxiety and second-guessing that accompanies it.
The underlying tensions of racial discord in the mixed salad, but not melting pot, that is America rise to the surface and explode in riots at the conclusion of the novel, and through Sonny's eyes we see the senseless discrimination and mob violence that ensues. I thought this would make great class reading for high school, until I remembered that high school parents don't appreciate sex scenes in their children's schoolbooks.
The underlying tensions of racial discord in the mixed salad, but not melting pot, that is America rise to the surface and explode in riots at the conclusion of the novel, and through Sonny's eyes we see the senseless discrimination and mob violence that ensues. I thought this would make great class reading for high school, until I remembered that high school parents don't appreciate sex scenes in their children's schoolbooks.
December 18, 2014
It's nice to read adult novels about Hispanic kids. But this book didn't wow me. Instead I kept reading it to see what was going to happen, but not too much did. The kid grew up. Sonny Bravo is a smart kid who follows his slutty mother around. She marries a white man who owns apartment buildings and he ends up being the errand boy--painting, taking out the trash, etc. In the process he meets everyone in the apartment building and they all teach him a lesson of some sort. One teaches him about lust. An old Russian man teaches him quiet lessons about being a man. Another young girl teaches him about love and letting go. through it all, Sonny grows up and learns a lot. He helps a young girl escape to Mexico and survives some racial violence. All in all, this book interested me, and I'm glad I read it. But I'm afraid I won't remember too much about it in a month or too.
October 17, 2008
Good , but not great. Sonny's voice is interesting and compelling . I loved certain things about the novel;the use of English and Spanish, the characters of the twins, and the very strong Mother/Son bond not often seen in literature written from the point of view of teens.
I really loved the strong beginning and the real sense of displacement and loneliness that you got from Sonny, the main character. I also loved the very real, very authentic and strongly conveyed feeling that you got from Sonny that he really was half a man and half a boy and didn't quite understand what was going on around him.
However,the character of Cindy seemed like a porn fantasy and the plot seemed unresolved.
I really loved the strong beginning and the real sense of displacement and loneliness that you got from Sonny, the main character. I also loved the very real, very authentic and strongly conveyed feeling that you got from Sonny that he really was half a man and half a boy and didn't quite understand what was going on around him.
However,the character of Cindy seemed like a porn fantasy and the plot seemed unresolved.
April 22, 2009
An adolescent boy moves with his mother to an apartment complex in Los Angeles because his mother has recently remarried. Her new husband owns the apartments. The boy works for his stepfather, painting, weeding, sweeping, and he gets to know the residents. One is a lonely married girl about his age who lures him into her apartment while the husband is at work. Another is a racist man who keeps tabs on a man who sells cars out of his apartment. The most touching is the illegal immigrant girl who babysits her brother everyday and longs to return to her home. There's bad language in English and Spanish, but nonetheless a very realistic story.
January 11, 2017
...was there a point to this book?
It leads up to so many potential follow throughs - but then it didn't follow through. ANY of them. So while the characters were at first an interesting cast...I'm left feeling rather unfulfilled. And confused. I have guesses, but where was the mom really going? The Pinkie storyline ended up doing absolutely nothing despite build up to the very last few pages of the book, and the "racial tensions" explode into some sort of unexplained riot that the characters drive through at the end...and then out of nowhere he just puts the girl on the bus?? If there was a plot I couldn't tell you what it was. And it didn't feel like the characters grew at all, sooooo...
It leads up to so many potential follow throughs - but then it didn't follow through. ANY of them. So while the characters were at first an interesting cast...I'm left feeling rather unfulfilled. And confused. I have guesses, but where was the mom really going? The Pinkie storyline ended up doing absolutely nothing despite build up to the very last few pages of the book, and the "racial tensions" explode into some sort of unexplained riot that the characters drive through at the end...and then out of nowhere he just puts the girl on the bus?? If there was a plot I couldn't tell you what it was. And it didn't feel like the characters grew at all, sooooo...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 21, 2008
A rambling character study of a Mexican American teenage boy who lives and works in a run-down apartment building owned by his red-necked stepfather. Kirkus Reviews compared it to The Outsiders, which is a far superior book in that it has a compelling storyline. Gilb just wanders around in an uneven narrative that, while full of interesting characters (the down and out inhabitants of the apartment building) never goes anywhere then ends abruptly with no real conclusion. Frankly, I wanted more story and less "quirky" character observations.
November 11, 2011
I found this one difficult to rate, almost gave it 4 "*"s... really interesting protagonist, chicango teenager, coming of age in the midst of cultural, racial, ethnic turmoil, not to mentions "sex, drugs, rock n' roll" - okay no rock n' roll. I liked him a lot, and found myself rooting for him. There's a sweetness to this story in the midst of all that was disturbing... as well as a small love story.
May 2, 2009
The more that I read this the more I realized that I just had to put it down. I never thought that the main character's voice was genuine. In the end, I just thought it was a very average book by someone who is acclaimed as a great new voice of his community. Hopefully, he finds that voice again in future works.
October 19, 2008
Dago does it again. Wonderful, fresh, alive language, a powerful mother-son relationship in unusual circumstances, the microcosm of an apartment complex in L.A., a confused teenager trying to make sense of his world, the racism of culture against culture, all the way to a fiery climax, this short novel delivers.
February 23, 2009
narrated by a Chicano teenager named Sonny, this book is easy to read and fast-paced. It deals with Sonny's life with his mother when she remarries and they move into an apartment building owned by her new husband, a bigoted hick whiteguy. the characters in the building all have their own issues and problems, and one of the central themes is race relations in LA. it's a moving and funny story.
August 22, 2024
Great writing
Loved this novel. The writing is really descriptive. Only took me a couple of days to read because it was so interesting. I wanted the story to keep on going so was a little disappointed that I didn't know what happened to the other characters. But that is a sign of good writing.
Loved this novel. The writing is really descriptive. Only took me a couple of days to read because it was so interesting. I wanted the story to keep on going so was a little disappointed that I didn't know what happened to the other characters. But that is a sign of good writing.
February 5, 2008
Deceiving despite mild poetic and social attempts.
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February 5, 2009Dagoberto Gilb, winner of the PEN/Hemmingway award for his 1994 short story collection The Magic of Blood, hasn't written a novel since The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acu
June 28, 2010
a rec from the Lisle Library
August 29, 2010
This is the Chicano "Catcher in the Rye."
December 23, 2010
great quick read. Loved Sonny. Great kid! Kind of weird ending.
June 28, 2011
This sad excuse for a 'coming-of-age' novel might be amongst the worst books I've read in the past five years.
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