Martels Booker-Prize winning Life of Pi (**** Nov/Dec 2002) merged fact with fiction, reality with fantastical constructs as an Indian boy navigated the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. This collection, written a decade before Life of Pi and spruced up for an American audience, shares the novels imaginative plotting, deep humanity, and narrative finesse. Butexcept, perhaps, for the deeply affecting title storyits not a masterpiece. A few reviewers criticized Martel for his literary conceits and lack of conviction in his own stories. Simply put, they had a harder time suspending disbelief in these shorter pieces. Still, if you enjoyed Life of Pi, youll appreciate this dazzling, if somewhat disorienting, collection. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. *Starred Review* This collection of two long and two short stories by the author of the avidly read and Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi (2002) was published a decade ago in Martel's native Canada and now is being released in the U.S. Its American appearance after all these years is due to the success of Pi, of course, but its postponement had nothing to do with a lack of artistry. These are stunning stories; they are drawn, like Pi, from the far reaches--not stretches--of the author's inventiveness. The title story is a masterpiece by any standard; the destructiveness of AIDS has rarely been rendered so universally as Martel parallels a long set of political horrors that have occurred over the twentieth century with the private ones endured over the course of a young man's fatal illness. The next story (bearing a title much too long to cite here) leaves the reader wondering what writer has understood as well as Martel the union of physical and emotional sensations that listening to beautiful music can induce. The last two stories--both much shorter--engage in elements of magic realism; in the first one, the author explores a range of personal reactions to death, and in the second, he suggests that much of what we see in ourselves is the construct of our memories. The collection is a multidimensional meditation on being and mortality and answering to a higher spirit--cerebral exercises, no question, but the sheer luminosity of Martel's prose style opens these stories' relevance and allure to a wide audience. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From The Washington Post
Before he achieved bestsellerdom with The Life of Pi, Yann Martel was the typical struggling writer, sending out dozens of stories to magazines only to receive dozens of rejections in return. But he persisted, found a home for some of them, and in 1993 gathered four of his best stories into a book published in Canada. Slightly revised and prefaced with a self-deprecating author's note, it has now appeared in America just in time for the holiday season. It's the perfect gift for the person who would appreciate the literary equivalent of tickets to the Cirque du Soleil.Each of these stories is a performance, a high-wire act in which the author sets himself an unusual challenge and dazzles us as he pulls it off. In the title story, the longest and most ambitious of the four, ringmaster Martel tells the story of a young man dying of AIDS. Or rather, he tells us how two young Canadians turned the dying of a young man of AIDS into a story. The 23-year-old narrator is a senior at Ellis University who volunteers to mentor a 19-year-old freshman, Paul; within three pages we're told Paul will die of AIDS, the result of a botched blood transfusion when he was 16. The narrator decides to stick with Paul to the end and comes up with an idea to pass the time: Remembering how Boccaccio's Decameron was based on stories characters told one another while waiting out the Black Death, he convinces Paul to construct a joint novel about a Canadian family whose activities would mirror the events of the 20th century, year by year.
Paul likes the idea, but to make it more exotic he shifts the locale to Helsinki and invents a Finnish-Italian family named the Roccamatios. Then Martel ups the ante and tells us not the story that the narrator and Paul come up with but the historical facts upon which the story is based. So: In 1901 Queen Victoria dies, and their novel likewise begins with the death of Sandro Roccamatio, the patriarch of the family. Thereafter, we get only a few details about the Roccamatios' saga but a year-by-year recital of historical events, which parallel Paul's illness. On good days, we get good events -- in 1921 insulin is discovered; and on bad days, we get the lies of "1936 -- The Spanish Civil War begins, exceptional in its bloodletting ferocity." Paul dies when their novel reaches 1963: "The year JFK was shot and people cried in the streets. The year I was born." Though this might sound contrived, too artsy for something as serious as dying from AIDS, Martel is able to maintain the strong "emotional foundation" that he insists (in his author's note) must be the basis for any good story. "But a story must also stimulate the mind if it does not want to fade from memory," he adds, and the intellectual balancing act he performs, juggling historical facts with clinical details of Paul's illness, elevates his story above the bulk of treatments of this sad subject.
The other three stories also deal with death and are likewise occasions to allow Martel to show off his literary skills. Two years after the first story, the same narrator (apparently) is in Washington, D.C., visiting a high-school friend, and relates "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton." His friend, now a well-paid but overworked consultant with an accounting firm, is too busy for him, so the narrator one night hears a concert put on by some Vietnam War vets. The composer of the story's title is a janitor who wrote a concerto for a fellow soldier -- a stunning piece but poorly played -- and as the narrator speaks with him after the concert, the career track that he and his friend are on dwindles into insignificance.
"Manners of Dying" consists of nine versions of a letter a prison warden writes to a woman to inform her of how her son Kevin "faced up to his execution by hanging for the crimes for which he was convicted." Each letter follows the same pattern -- his last meal, his interaction with a priest, his final words -- but differs in details. Which one is real? Which does he actually mail? We're not told. The last one is numbered 1096; there are at least that many different ways to face a hanging, and an inventive writer can come up with at least that many variations.
The final story, "The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come," is the trickiest, both in form and subject matter. A pretentious young man is visiting his grandmother; the text is divided into two columns with different typefaces, the grandmother on the left, telling long stories about her youth and her dead husband (often reduced to "blah-blah-blah-blah-") and the grandson on her right, making snide remarks ("Man, she can go on"). While there, he comes across an antique mirror-making machine that is activated by spoken memories; when the mirror comes out of the machine, it is covered with the text of the spoken words, which soon fades away, leaving only a reflecting surface. It's a magic-realist story, recalling those superstitions about mirrors possessing the souls of those who gazed into them, but also the practice of artists who use mirrors to create self-portraits.
It's an eerie note to end the book on, leaving the reader a little disoriented but enchanted. The young man who wrote these stories clearly had a mirror-bright future in fiction ahead of him.
Reviewed by Steven Moore
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review
PRAISE FOR THE FACTS BEHIND THE HELSINKI ROCCAMATIOS
"Each of these stories is a performance, a high-wire act in which the author sets himself an unusual challenge and dazzles us as he pulls it off. "--The Washington Post Book World
"With uncommon dexterity, Martel . . . inject[s] real, poignant feeling into cleverly conceived experimental fictions."--Entertainment Weekly
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
I hadn’t known Paul for very long. We met in the fall of 1986 at Ellis University, in Roetown, just east of Toronto. I had taken time off and worked and travelled to India: I was twenty-three and in my last year. Paul had just turned nineteen and was entering first year. At the beginning of the year at Ellis, some senior students introduce the first-years to the university. There are no pranks or mischief or anything like that; the seniors are there to be helpful. They’re called “amigos” and the first-years “amigees”, which shows you how much Spanish they speak in Roetown. I was an amigo and most of my amigees struck me as cheerful, eager and young — very young. But right away I liked Paul’s laidback, intelligent curiosity and his sceptical turn of mind. The two of us clicked and we started hanging out together. Because I was older and I had done more things, I usually spoke with the authority of a wise guru, and Paul listened like a young disciple — except when he raised an eyebrow and said something that threw my pompousness right into my face. Then we laughed and broke from these roles and it was plain what we were: really good friends.
Then, hardly into second term, Paul fell ill. Already at Christmas he had had a fever, and since then he had been carrying around a dry, hacking cough he couldn’t get rid of. Initially, he — we — thought nothing of it. The cold, the dryness of the air — it was something to do with that.
Slowly things got worse. Now I recall signs that I didn’t think twice about at the time. Meals left unfinished. A complaint once of diarrhea. A lack of energy that went beyond phlegmatic temperament. One day we were climbing the stairs to the library, hardly twenty-five steps, and when we reached the top, we stopped. I remember realizing that the only reason we had stopped was because Paul was out of breath and wanted to rest. And he seemed to be losing weight. It was hard to tell, what with the heavy winter sweaters and all, but I was certain that his frame had been stockier earlier in the year. When it became clear that something was wrong, we talked about it — nearly casually, you must understand — and I played doctor and said, “Let’s see . . . breathlessness, cough, weight loss, fatigue. Paul, you have pneumonia.” I was joking, of course; what do I know? But that’s in fact what he had. It’s called Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, PCP to intimates. In mid-February Paul went to Toronto to see his family doctor.
Nine months later he was dead.
AIDS. He announced it to me over the phone in a detached voice. He had been gone nearly two weeks. He had just got back from the hospital, he told me. I reeled. My first thoughts were for myself. Had he ever cut himself in my presence? If so, what had happened? Had I ever drunk from his glass? Shared his food? I tried to establish if there had ever been a bridge between his system and mine. Then I thought of him. I thought of gay sex and hard drugs. But Paul wasn’t gay. He had never told me so outright, but I knew him well enough and I had never detected the least ambivalence. I likewise couldn’t imagine him a heroin addict. In any case, that wasn’t it. Three years ago, when he was sixteen, he had gone to Jamaica on a Christmas holiday with his parents. They had had a car accident. Paul’s right leg had been broken and he’d lost some blood. He had received a blood transfusion at the local hospital. Six witnesses of the accident had come along to volunteer blood. Three were of the right blood group. Several phone calls and a little research turned up the fact that one of the three had died unexpectedly two years later while being treated for pneumonia. An autopsy had revealed that the man had severe toxoplasmic cerebral lesions. A suspicious combination.
I went to visit Paul that weekend at his home in wealthy Rosedale. I didn’t want to; I wanted to block the whole thing off mentally. I asked — this was my excuse — if he was sure his parents cared for a visitor. He insisted that I come. And I did. I came through. I drove down to Toronto. And I was right about his parents. Because what hurt most that first weekend was not Paul, but Paul’s family.
After learning how he had probably caught the virus, Paul’s father, Jack, didn’t utter a syllable for the rest of that day. Early the next morning he fetched the tool kit in the basement, put his winter parka over his housecoat, stepped out onto the driveway, and proceeded to destroy the family car. Because he had been the driver when they had had the accident in Jamaica, even though it hadn’t been his fault and it had been in another car, a rental. He took a hammer and shattered all the lights and windows. He scraped and trashed the entire body. He banged nails into the tires. He siphoned the gasoline from the tank, poured it over and inside the car, and set it on fire. That’s when neighbours called the firefighters. They rushed to the scene and put the fire out. The police came, too. When he blurted out why he had done it, all of them were very understanding and the police left without charging him or anything; they only asked if he wanted to go to the hospital, which he didn’t. So that was the first thing I saw when I walked up to Paul’s large, corner-lot house: a burnt wreck of a Mercedes covered in dried foam.
Jack was a hard-working corporate lawyer. When Paul introduced me to him, he grinned, shook my hand hard and said, “Good to meet you!” Then he didn’t seem to have anything else to say. His face was red. Paul’s mother, Mary, was in their bedroom. I had met her at the beginning of the university year. As a young woman she had earned an M.A. in anthropology from McGill, she had been a highly ranked amateur tennis player, and she had travelled. Now she worked part-time for a human rights organization. Paul was proud of his mother and got along with her very well. She was a smart, energetic woman. But here she was, lying awake on the bed in a fetal position, looking like a wrinkled balloon, all the taut vitality drained out of her. Paul stood next to the bed and just said, “My mother.” She barely reacted. I didn’t know what to do. Paul’s sister, Jennifer, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Toronto, was the most visibly distraught. Her eyes were red, her face was puffy — she looked terrible. I don’t mean to be funny, but even George H., the family Labrador, was grief-stricken. He had squeezed himself under the living-room sofa, wouldn’t budge, and whined all the time.
The verdict had come on Wednesday morning, and since then (it was Friday) none of them, George H. included, had eaten a morsel of food. Paul’s father and mother hadn’t gone to work, and Jennifer hadn’t gone to school. They slept, when they slept, wherever they happened to be. One morning I found Paul’s father sleeping on the living-room floor, fully dressed and wrapped in the Persian rug, a hand reaching for the dog beneath the sofa. Except for frenzied bursts of phone conversation, the house was quiet.
In the middle of it all was Paul, who wasn’t reacting. At a funeral where the family members are broken with pain and grief, he was the funeral director going about with professional calm and dull sympathy. Only on the third day of my stay did he start to react. But death couldn’t make itself understood. Paul knew that something awful was happening to him, but he couldn’t grasp it. Death was beyond him. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover
"Yann Martel's new, strong voice weaves together our smallest anxieties and memories with the sentences and executions passed upon all of us by war, crime, and life. AIDS is blended into the lunacy of history. Violins into the Vietnam war. Variations on a warden's letter to the mother of a son he has just hanged are laid out as in a manual of etiquette. Martel has that rare talent of making fiction true and thus painful yet compelling." -- John Ralston Saul
"'The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios' is a story of extreme youth and death, and I find it hard to describe just how moving it is.... When I finished reading it, I telephoned a friend, wanting company, but found that I was incoherent; I simply couldn't tell her what had happened to me.... It is one of the strange things about art that what devastates us also in some way heals us, or at least leads us to where we need to go." -- Merna Summers, Canadian Forum
"Many of Yann Martel's stories have fantastical curves...turns of magical possibility that evoke Calvino or Borges." -- Kingston Whig Standard
"Those who would believe that the art of fiction is moribund... let them read Yann Martel with astonishment, delight and gratitude." -- Alberto Manguel
"A brilliant debut. Few works of fiction have moved me as much as 'The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios'. Yann Martel is a young wizard." -- Leon Rooke
Yann Martel's brilliant storytelling... shines brightly." -- The Globe and Mail --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author
Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963. After majoring in philosophy, he worked odd jobs and traveled before turning to writing at the age of twenty-six. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed 2002 Man Booker Prizewinning bestseller, Life of Pi. He currently lives in Saskatchewan, Canada.
--This text refers to the audioCD edition. From the Inside Flap
The title story, The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, won the 1991 Journey Prize and was included in the 1991-92 Pushcart Prize Anthology. The intensely human tragedy that lies at its heart is told with a spare, careful elegance that resonates long after it has ended – and is matched through all the stories by an original and dazzling freshness. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Book Description
Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2004, 0-15-101090-0
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Four stories from before Martel's breakout LIFE OF PI are read by four proficient narrators, whose voices match their characters well. Jeff Woodman, in the title novella, is perhaps the standout, but he has the meatiest, most emotional, material. Barbara Caruso, a second reader in the last story, overdoes the "quavery old lady" voice. But good use is made of the aural medium as the depiction of how her words sound to her grandson--"blah, blah, blah"--overlays his spoken thoughts. The stories themselves are pleasant enough middlebrow fiction (think Thornton Wilder as novelist), sometimes gimmicky but generally entertaining, except for the monotonous "Manners of Dying," which goes on too long. W.M. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
