A Vaudeville of Devils: 7 Moral Tales [Paperback]

Robert Girardi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 1999

From the acclaimed author of Madeleine's Ghost and Vaporetto 13 comes a mesmerizing collection of seven novellas and stories that explore, through the lives of a variety of extraordinary and ordinary characters, our many moral quandaries.

Meet Hans Otto Graebner as he lingers in the beach resort of Ostend, on the North Sea. Soon this haggard SS officer will be dispatched to perform the menial but necessary task of locating and assassinating a degenerate Belgian painter.

Join "The Dinner Party," where a man stands adrift in a distinctly Borgesian universe, somewhere at the end of time. It could be the Apocalypse or some ghoulish carnival. He's attending a feast at an anonymous mansion while the fall of Babylon is acted out around him, and he struggles to hold on to the faint remnants of his conscience while the world goes up in flames.

Turn to a search for "The Primordial Face," in which two expatriates, one of them mute, go diving for a mythological treasure at the bottom of the sea and wind up competing for the love of the obsessive expedition leader's young daughter.

And spend "Sunday Evenings at Contessa Pasquali's," where a man and a woman torture each other with indifference and affection and find that love can be born of terrible schemes.

With this volume, Robert Girardi illustrates a world that is both beautifully alluring and brilliantly sinister, where souls are lost and won on the simple weight of everyday decisions. Rich with history and irony, vastly entertaining and told in the timeless style of tales, fables, and myths, these meditations on morality remind us of the eternal human condition.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A Vaudeville of Devils reveals its weighty preoccupation with its anachronistic subtitle, 7 Moral Tales, introducing the mythic dramas within. Lavish, enigmatic, and faintly sinister, Robert Girardi's fourth book flaunts a Borges-like sensibility, faux folklore encompassing an enormous universe. Moving from the medieval Levant to post-apocalyptic California, its concern is the moment of choice, when characters are confounded by dilemma.

In "The Demons Tormenting Untersturmführer Hans Otto Graebner" an SS officer dispatched to destroy allegedly subversive paintings finds himself first confronted with his own hypocrisy and then, literally, captured by art itself. "The Primordial Face" follows an obsessive Arabian's search for a legendary carving on the floor of the sea while his two divers succumb to the charms of his young daughter. "Three Ravens on a Red Ground" juxtaposes a Crusading knight devoted to a lost cause with a suburban executive troubled by an impending merger. "The Dinner Party" takes place at the end of the world, where martini-sipping gods icily dismiss their flame-ravaged creation. And in "Arcana Mundi," an eerie, fairy-tale-like retelling of an ancient Greek story, a vintner allows two mysterious strangers to raise his young daughter.

Rich in setting if slightly rigid in emotion, Girardi's stories are a strange brew of mystery and meaning. Decisiveness comes slowly to his protagonists, suggesting that, while existence demands resolve, the guideposts are few. Or, as one character explains, "Without God, friend, the world is a vaudeville of devils." --Ben Guterson

From Publishers Weekly

"Without God, friend, the world is a vaudeville of devils. An absurd carnival full of people fornicating to no purpose and shooting each other over a joke." The speaker, an incidental character in one of the seven long stories in Girardi's (Madeline's Ghost) fine collection, illustrates the refulgent and violent vortex in which many of the protagonists operate. The men in these tales must often make all-important, sometimes split-second decisions, and make them alone, finding themselves in a moral vacuum. In "The Demons Tormenting Untersturmf?hrer Hans Otto Graebner," an SS officer must choose between exterminating or sparing the "subversive" Belgian artist James Ensor, in whom he recognizes extraordinary gifts. Tom, a top executive of a semiconductor company in "Three Ravens on a Red Ground," will either profit from inevitable takeover by a Japanese firm or stand by the hundreds of employees who will lose their jobs; in counterpoint runs the interpolated story of Tom's ancestor, a brave and virtuous knight pledged to a doomed but noble cause. Not all of the protagonists' choices are as ethically unambiguous. The post-apocalyptic father in "Arcana Mundi" regrets his decision to relinquish his clairvoyant young daughter to the tutelage of two disturbingly cerebral mystics, irreversibly severing his human bond with her. And in "Dinner at Contessa Pasquali's," a man realizes the frightening degree to which his Neapolitan wife has manipulated him into marriage. Does his choice to remain with her reveal deeply sympathetic love or a surrender to fate? Touched with a near-maddening mysteriousness, and enriched by lavish historical, dystopic and dream-like settings, these vividly detailed tales give voice to specters of the dark side.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Delta (May 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385333986
• ISBN-13: 978-0385333986
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,238,601 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ROBERT GIRARDI is the author of five nov­els and one volume of novellas. His short fic­tion has been pub­lished in Tri-Quarterly and Vir­ginia Lit­er­ary Review, and his non-fiction has appeared in The New Repub­lic, Washingtonian Magazine, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and The Wash­ing­ton Post. His novels have been translated into nine languages--including Hebrew and Estonian. He lives in Wash­ing­ton, DC with his three children. He sells tickets at a movie theater in Bethesda, Maryland, and works as sexton of Our Lady of Victory Church in Washington, DC. (Visit him on the web at girardilit.com : email at [e-mail].)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Girardi's images will haunt you, December 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Vaudeville of Devils (Hardcover)

I haven't ever read anything written by this author aside from these short stories, so I cannot make any comparison's for you, but I was impressed with Girardi's ability to create suspense and "mood" with his words. Several of the stories ran through my mind for days after I read them. I guess I don't agree with the other reviewers. I think that this book is great BECAUSE the stories are disturbing and BECAUSE some of the scenerios are so far-fetched. Plus, the plots seemed very different to me despite the fact that they all dealt with similar issues of choice, fear, and regret. I look forward to reading one of Girardi's novels. To the other reviewers I say- instead of feeling threatened by the melancholy atmosphere of the book, perhaps you should figure out why it bothers you so.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Stuff, January 31, 2003

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Vaudeville of Devils: 7 Moral Tales (Paperback)

We read this for our bookgroup, putting an end to three years of my intending to read it. The seven stories here range from 20-110 pages and are united by both the theme or morality and Girardi's excellent writing and ability to create a vibrant sense of place and dark tone. He's said in interviews that he's deeply influenced by Poe and Hawthorne, and it's entirely evident here, for these are not short stories in the modern style, but tales in the old-fashioned sense. Spanning genres, from historical fiction, to sci-fi, to thriller, to crime, to romance, the stories revolve around moral choices faced by individuals. The stories are not perfect however, due to their semi-mythic nature, some wander rather close to cliché and predictability. And at times, certain characters are a little too single-minded or focused on one thing. Different people will, of course, have their own favorites.

The opening story, "The Demons...", is the brief WWII tale set in occupied Holland. The tale of an SS officer ordered to kill a Dutch painter can almost be considered a warm-up for the rest of the tales. The next story, "Three Ravens on A Red Ground," is the least nuanced of the seven, and probably my least favorite. It switches back and forth between the story of a Seattle businessman whose firm is being bought out by a Japanese firm, and the story of his ancestor who fought in the Crusades. "The Dinner Party" follows it with a brief semi-surreal tale of alien invasion in which the question is raised as to whether one should compromise one's ideals in order to alleviate suffering for many. As a take on "The Last Supper" it's not a bad idea, full of vivid imagery, but not particularly satisfying either.

The fourth tale, "The Primordial Face," was my favorite-though interestingly enough, the least favorite of many of the people in my book club. It's the story of a Yemeni businessman in pursuit of a mythic treasure lost at sea who hires two freelance divers, one Cuban-American, one German, to join him on a secret expedition. There's a great mood of dark adventure and tension that builds to a somewhat uneven conclusion. Still, this is the tale that had me engrossed far more than any other. "Arcana Mundi" is an interesting sci-fi story set in Napa Valley of the past, just after a plague has wiped out the grape harvest. The moral question here is again one of whether one should sacrifice for a greater good or not. It engendered more discussion amongst our group than any of the other stories.

The sixth tale, "The Defenestration of Aba Sid" is a legal/crime story set in Washington, D.C. It concerns a hopeless public defender who gets assigned the murder case of a notorious Russian mafia type so that the Feds can be sure the Russian will get convicted. It's not really clear why the Russian can't hire a "real" lawyer, but putting that aside... The realization of why he is assigned the case transforms the public defender from schmuck to determined worker, and he digs deep into the Russian's case. The crime story is fairly interesting, as is the Russian Mafia background material. The moral issue reveals itself at the very end, and revolves around the notion of justice. The final story, "Sunday Evenings", revolves around an American expatriate in Naples, and is rather languid and desultory.

Altogether a highly satisfactory reading experience and one that'll have me seeking more of Girardi's work out.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, but the title is misleading..., April 26, 2001

By 

J. N. Mohlman (Barrington, RI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Vaudeville of Devils (Hardcover)

...the "moral" part that is. I say misleading because "moral" implies that the author will be shoving his own personal world view down the reader's the throat. Thankfully, this couldn't be further from the truth! Rather moral refers to the value judgements the characters in each of these stories is forced to make; decisions which form the crux of each story.

The stories are already outlined in Amazon's review, so I won't rehash them. Two points worth making, however. First, each story is unique, and remarkably imaginative. They bear comparison in terms of the characters' feelings and decisions, but the similarity ends there. Second, Girardi is a remarkably talented writer, with a style very reminscent of Poe. The stories are frequently dark, even brooding, but their careful crafting and obvious literary merit save them from being tedious.

"Vaudeville of Devils" is a unique collection of wonderfully rich short stories. Even better, the theme of moral crisis will leave the reader chewing over them for some time to come. Enjoy!