"The Sound of Building Coffins
is filled with the music of New Orleans
-- the richly
imagined siren song of Buddy Bolden's horn, cacophony to
some, sweet
inspiration to others; the lapping waves of the Mississippi;
the clamor of
Storyville barrooms; the banter of street corners.
"This is a novel
about love and life and death, New Orleans-style, when
a cure can take the
form of a healing or an abortion or an exorcism;
where a hand on a heart can
be a blessing or a burden; where the
dead walk among the living and are
known and listened to; where spirits
live on and on, to torment or to love.
"Maistros creates a city that is part dream, part hallucination. His New
Orleans embodies both the grim reality of a particular time and the city's
eternal, shimmering beauty. And, with the book's title, he provides us
with a new and unforgettable metaphor for the sound of hammers at
work,
whether boarding up for a storm or rebuilding after
one."
"(The Sound of Building
Coffins) a
macabre and utterly hypnotic feat of literary imagination, an extended tale of
voodoo and jazz in the Crescent City, circa the turn of the 20th century. The
novel is so fluently delivered that it sometimes feels as if it were being
channeled via the same spirits - evil and good - that inhabit these richly drawn
characters.
"Maistros, a New
Orleans record-store owner and former forklift operator with no formal training
as a writer, has crafted a work spiked with historical characters and events, so
striking and original that it probably deserves a place on the shelf of great
fiction from his adopted hometown."
--Philip Booth, St. Petersburg
Times
"
"The multiple plot
lines smoothly interlock like simultaneous horn solos in an early Louis
Armstrong single, and the steady flow of closely observed details and dialogue
are a consistent pleasure."
Joab Jackson, The Baltimore City
Paper
"One has to write with
considerable authenticity to pull off a story
steeped in magic and swamp
water that examines race and class, death
and rebirth, Haitian voodoo, and
the beginnings of jazz in 1891 New
Orleans. Maistros's gritty debut novel
follows the interconnected lives of
the Morningstar siblings-all lovingly
named by their father after diseases -
as they wrestle with a powerful demon,
con outsiders, kill and die, die
and are reborn. The plot is complex and
magical, grounded in the history
of the city, without being overly
sentimental. There is a comfort with
death as a part of life in this work
that reveals deep feeling for the city
and its past. Of course, every novel
about New Orleans must have a
good hurricane. Like the one in Zora Neale
Hurston's classic Their Eyes
Were Watching God, this hurricane destroys the
city while making hope
possible. Highly recommended for all fiction
collections, especially where
there is an interest in jazz."
-- Library
Journal
"A book like The Sound of Building
Coffins couldn't have been set
anywhere else than in
New Orleans. This is a good thing -- even people
who haven't had the
experience of living there can get a feeling for
the place, thanks to the
wonderful writing of Louis Maistros. But for
anyone who has lived there,
this book sings out in true jazz fashion --
wildly inventive, oddly formed
yet perfectly made, and never a
sour note."
--
The Anniston
Star
"If Maistros was a traditional storyteller rather than a writer,
he would be one of those gifted individuals that you would listen to raptly,
late into the night."
-- The Roanoke
Times
"The Sound of Building
Coffins manages to be surprising and deeply inventive through to the
end... For those of us who were schooled in the refined belle-lettres traditions
of American literature, this novel is a raw
and unsubtle example of what it
means to open a vein and write. To wit: 'Like a hurricane party or a jazz
funeral, an embrace of some fast-coming
and brilliantly inevitable (if
unjust) end, an open invitation ot the last and wildest party on earth, a high
stakes gamble with neither certainty nor hope'."
-- The Alabama
Press-Register
"Maistros succeeds by populating (the novel) with
hoodoo queens, jazzbos, tricksters, rounders, and various folks with one foot in
reality and the other in the spirit world. Such an approach richly underscores
his overreaching themes of life and death, salvation and damnation, birth and
rebirth, as his lively cast of characters struggle through troubled times with
equally troubled souls. ... A sprawling, complex, and ultimately absorbing
work."
--John Lewis, Baltimore
Magazine
"The stories [of The Sound of Building Coffins] weave in and
out 'like threads in a rug,' connecting in a lyrical prose that's as unique to
Maistros
as his story... In the back of your mind, you know that
Maistros's
absorbing tale will lead to a grand finale, one that will explain
all.
"And he delivers.
"It's hard to read a New Orleans novel with
so many water references
and not connect the story to the events of 2005.
But this is not a
Katrina book. Instead, Maistros displays what most of us
realize despite
the horrors of the past few years, that New Orleans flirts
with death constantly, whether it be yellow fever, hurricanes or devastating
fires.
"And as Marcus Nobody Special learns, the waters come to
wash over the city and all is reborn."
Click Erzulie Freda
to return home.
Click Erzulie Freda
to return home.
