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.

As for the biography of the author being celebrated here, let us not look too closely. If we avoid the closet where one hell of a roman à clef hides on a shelf, then his shadow by starlight may be cast in a few facts. Warren R. B. Dixon lives in the Champlain Valley on the New York side with a wife, two dogs, five thousand books, two pianos and a large music library. He is an economist emeritus and a coffee-house philosopher. Waitresses at the diner on Cumberland Head know his first name. He can be found from time to time under the sprawl of the Southern Cross in the Transvaal or in the farthest reaches of Tierra del Fuego or almost anywhere between Cape Reinga and Invercargill in New Zealand. He has been known to hang out among the squares of Savannah. While he moonlights as a virtuoso listener to Haydn and Scarlatti, he is a full-time writer. He claims to be a literary Old Man and the Sea.