In Vaudeville! no one is who he or she appears, including Xavier, a seventeen-year-old apprentice demolition man who claims to be an immigrant from Hungary. After Xavier falls into a hole, he suffers bizarre humiliations and eventually loses his job. Soon he and his singing frog are hired to perform in a vaudeville show in which violence and ugliness blend like a cartooni with comedy and music. Vaudeville!, Gaétan Soucy's fascinating tableau, dares us to look into the darkest sides of the human experience.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Checkmate,
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This review is from: Vaudeville! (Hardcover)
I'm not usually taken by "postmodern" fiction nor by "magical realism", which seems neither magical nor realistic to me. This novel is a bit of an exception because it's not so heavy-handed in its absurdist "magical" (so called) interludes. But, above all, I liked this book because it was fun to read. Soucy manages not to go off the cliff with the absurdist elements, and life is, after all, more than a bit absurd at times.
The notes attached to the end of my edition of the book compare it to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Thematically, this is true. The problem is that, unlike Frankenstein, one doesn't have much of a clue as to what constitutes the theme until the tag end of the book. I think a better comparison, based on the books stylistic merits, is to Marquez. But the book is really too sui generis for any pat comparison of this sort. It's too real for Magical Realism, and too random to compare to any Victorian novel. Reading it, I was reminded of "probability waves" that graduate students in physics deal in. On some exams they are required to calculate the likelihood that they will appear on the other side of the wall which they are abutting.-Ahem, it's a very small number-In short, this book does manage to portray without the "giggle factor" in most books of this sort, our world, "...this hell capable of all manner of wonders."----Chess addicts will probably fancy it as well.
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