Louis Maistros
Författare till The Sound of Building Coffins
Om författaren
Foto taget av: Photo by Booker Maistros, age 7
Verk av Louis Maistros
The Big Punch 1 exemplar
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Vedertaget namn
- Maistros, Louis
- Födelsedag
- 1962-10-18
- Kön
- male
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Bostadsorter
- New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
- Yrken
- writer
- Organisationer
- Authors Guild
- Agent
- Barbara Braun Associates, Inc.
- Kort biografi
- Louis Maistros is a longtime resident of the New Orleans 8th Ward neighborhood. A former forklift operator and self-taught writer with no formal training, his writing has appeared in publications such as the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Baltimore City Paper. Along with his wife Elly, he currently owns and operates Louie's Juke Joint, a combination jazz record shop and Vodou botanica. He is mildly self-conscious about the fact that he shares a birthday with Lee Harvey Oswald, and is currently working out a conspiracy theory about that.
Medlemmar
Recensioner
Listor
To Read - Horror (1)
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Statistik
- Verk
- 4
- Medlemmar
- 184
- Popularitet
- #117,736
- Betyg
- 3.8
- Recensioner
- 17
- ISBN
- 4
This novel was recommended to me by someone whose taste generally crosses with mine. I read the first chapter before deciding I would read the book, and I found it quite strange but somehow interesting. I took a leap of faith and chose it as a group read, and I might owe my apologies to the group! I’d say it isn’t for everyone.
It isn’t the worst thing I have ever read, in fact it is oddly mesmerizing, with some eloquent prose and some catchy characters. It is also just exceedingly weird and at times totally meaningless. I believe it is meant to be about death and the cycle of life, but it is a mix of too many floating ideas for me to be sure that is even the impetus. It no doubt falls into the Magical Realism category, which isn’t a favorite for me, although the magical part of this is part of the Louisiana bayou voodoo culture and seems to blend in believably with the environment it is set in.
Imaginary people real, too—in their way. If a person can remember or even dream up a face, then the face does exist in some kinda way. Things remembered are sometimes more real than what a person holds in his hand.
At about halfway through, courtesy of a fellow reader, I found out that one of the characters, Buddy Bolden, was a real person. He is held to be the first Jazz player and made his way through the seedier side of New Orleans nightlife and brothel areas, playing his trumpet in his own distinctive style. Somehow, knowing that at least one of these characters actually existed, added some grounding and credence to the novel itself.
When we think about death and New Orleans, there is a marked difference from death in other places. The way the dead are buried, the way they are seen to their graves in parades and with music, and the always sweeping threat of the water.
In this city there is a long and curious relationship with death, a closeness, a delicate truce. They say in New Orleans death is so close that the dead are mostly buried above ground, that the dead share altitude with the living.
This book is more about the dead than the living, but then, in this book, it is sometimes hard to tell which we are dealing with. In the end, it was just a little too strange for me. 2.5 Stars, rounded down.
… (mer)