The Matryoshka Man

The final novel of the trilogy, The Matryoshka Man, is the black novel. It is a cabaret piano roll with black keys flashing. It is a story of Louis Armstrong's dark sacred night, of a man who ate the sun, of lightning bugs in an alder grove, and of starlight in the Okefenokee Swamp. More than a century ago in a little monastery town some forty-five miles or so from Moscow, the first nesting dolls of Russia were made to look like men, faces within faces, to show different characters within the same doll. So also runs the narrative of a man called Legion Madrigal. It is a book of genetic fire descended from the black Mozart of France, Joseph de Bologna, into the streets of Asheville, Harlem, Savannah, Detroit, Kansas City, East Saint Louis, Monterey, New Orleans, and Memphis, across the whole of the Twentieth Century.