Customer Reviews

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Yann Martel, author of the best-selling Life of Pi, here offers some of his earlier work--four short stories which do not exactly fit the short story mold.

The first story, same name as the collection's title, is an extended meditation on dying. As the young narrator struggles with his friend's terminal illness, the two men embark on a project to pass the time and keep up their spirits. They decide to write a novel about an imaginary family--the Roccamatios of Helsinki, whose lives parallel, year by year, the years of the twentieth century. We are not told much about this novel or its characters. The writing, the research, the assembling of facts about the twentieth century, are used to highlight the illness and death of the friend.

Also included are a story about a Viet Nam veteran, a talented but unrecognized composer who struggles with the meaning of life while working as a night custodian in a bank. And a composition about the night a young man is hanged (for some unnamed crime), the story told in multiple variations, over and over. The book concludes with a strange tale of an old machine that makes mirrors out of memories. And about the importance of memory itself.

Author Yann Martel does not shrink from the extreme and unusual. After all, he wrote the novel about a young man in a lifeboat with a tiger, and made it almost believable. The stories in this small collection are similarly over-the-edge. They are well written, clever, almost too clever. For me the author allows his cleverness and his mastery of the language to overshadow the characters. The stories are not meant to be literally believeable, but, in the end, they are not emotionally believable either.

Still, these stories are well worth reading. If you liked the Life of Pi you will love the Roccamatios as well. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Yann Martel's Booker prize-winning 'Life of Pi' is a phenomenal book, and I have been eager to read something else by him ever since I finished it. I got my wish with this book, which is a re-printing of an earlier work of his. In the author's note Martel refers to its stories as his world premiere, harking back to the days when he was just starting out as a writer. He ambitiously set out to combine intellect and emotion in his stories, reasoning that intellect makes a story last while it is emotion that makes it relatable and appeals to the reader. It is easy to see Martel's developing genius in these stories, but there are unfortunate growing pains as well. In his quest to write stories both intelligent and stirring Martel did what most inexperienced writers will do: he over-reached. The stories are intellectual (at times inaccessably so), and there is plenty of emotion represented, but there is little heart. The lone exception is the titular story, about a man and his dying friend, who create a fictional family to tell stories about. It's a brilliant story, executed as only the author of a book like 'Life of Pi' could do. 'The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American composer John Morton' really could have done with a shorter title, but is almost up to Martel's standard. It's too long; the description of the concert itself could have been shorter as that part is boring, and the real meat of the story gets crammed into the somewhat illogical events of the last few pages. The meat, once you've gotten to it, is quite juicy actually. The payoff saves the story, but the same can't be said of 'Manners of Dying' -- which has an interesting premise but leads nowhere. It's high-concept writing that misses the mark. 'The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company' has a great message to relate, but the medium sending it is far from perfect.

I would recommend this book only to big fans of 'Life of Pi', because I do not think that anyone who was new to Yann Martel would appreciate this book for what it is: a starting point. As for myself, I'm revising my previous belief that I wanted to read something else by Martel to that I would like to read something new by him.

yann martel renowned for his booker prize winning life of pi, started off his publishing career with this colelction of short stories/novellas. the stories range from the sublime, to the sad to the silly covering a wide-ranging set of topics from death, to inspiration to music to memory.

while the stories are well written they sometimes lack in ideas, however martel's steady prose and studied observations make them a fast read. while these 4 stories will make do for a quiet evening, it is interesting to read an author who is still working at mastering his craft.

more novelty than genius.

Yann Martel catapulted to fame with his extraordinary tale - The Life of Pi. In The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios Martel digs into his early works and presents us with four short stories, written before the Life of Pi. Of the four stories, the first two were for me the most memorable. The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios is a story of a young man helping his college friend as he struggles with and ultimately succumbs to AIDS. The two men meet often over several months and collaboratively create a story, whose narrative line loosely follows the major events of the 20th century, starting with 1901.

The second story, The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton, is about a man's chance encounter with the extraordinary music of an unknown composer, a Vietnam vet who works the night shift at a bank as a janitor. Both stories demonstrate Martel's skill with prose and gift as a storyteller.

Martel's author's note in the beginning of the book is worth a read. In it he details his years of failed attempts at writing. I have a writer friend who once told me that in order to be a good writer, one must be willing to be a bad writer. Clearly this is what happened with Martel. Thank goodness he had parents who didn't push him into being something he wasn't, but supported him even when he wasn't producing results. Martel spent much of his early years learning and exploring, building the palette of experiences he could draw upon for his fiction.

If you loved Life of Pi, you will very likely enjoy this small collection of stories.

I have not read "Life of Pi" yet, but I have heard so many good things about that novel that when I saw this collection of short stories in the bookstore I was intrigued. I started browsing through the foreword, and immediately came to the conclusion that Martel has an innate ability for writing that places him in a select group of authors. That is why I decided to read this book, which contains four stories from the early stages of his career. When I compare the writing used in these stories with the one in the foreword, I cannot help feeling that the author has evolved considerably, but the stories still show early signs of a great writer.

The topics of these short works are highly unusual, which I believe makes them interesting overall, but at some points I found myself feeling that the author was trying to be unique to the extreme, and therefore, going overboard. The first story is the one that gives name to the collection, and the one I found to be the most touching. In this narration, the author presents the account of his relationship with a friend from college and the events that unfolded after this friend was diagnosed with AIDS. Martel shows a natural ability for reaching the heart of the reader with its vibrant descriptions of the emotions the characters experience when faced with such an enormous tragedy. Maybe the fact that the story is based on a real life event, that the author had to face, helped him with making it so vivid.

The other three stories use as topics a peculiar concert in Washington DC with references to how the Vietnam war affected the life of many, a collection of letters with different outcomes regarding the termination of a prisoner waiting for his death sentence, and a machine that makes mirrors by feeding on stories. As you can quickly realize, none of these have as a topic one that you are likely to find in works by other authors, and that makes them unique and valuable based on the author's imagination. The fact that the writing is not as polished as one would like is just evidence that the author was in the process of discovering himself and searching for the style that suited him best. It is extremely interesting to see how Martel wrote before becoming famous, and this is enough reason to make the book worth reading. - 3.5 stars.

If, like me, you are awaiting author Yann Martel's next creative work after his whimsical animal allegory, "Life of Pi", then you can get a fix in the meantime with these four short stories written by the author about ten years ago. You definitely see the talent forming and consequently expect unwarranted flashes of brazenness here and there.

The book's title is actually the title of the first story told in the first person. The Roccamatios are an imaginary Italian family living in Finland in the late 1980's, and their friend Paul is dying of AIDS. In order to alleviate the unrelenting grief of the situation, the narrator invents a game where he and Paul each takes turns picking one fact from each year of the twentieth century. Their characters reveal themselves piece by piece by what fact they choose. It's a creative if bit contrived two-character study, which ultimately reflects a dying wish to preserve the past and somehow immortalize Paul. The second story has the unwieldy title of "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton." It's about a Canadian who visits Washington, D.C., in 1989, and has a chance encounter with a Vietnam War veteran who leads an ensemble of his former comrades in arms in an abandoned theater. The music they play becomes cathartic to the visitor, and in turn, the musicians recount their wartime experiences in unexpected ways. Like one of the better episodes of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery", the story becomes a meditative examination of loneliness, lost opportunities and reaching for something that is beyond your grasp.

The third story, entitled "Manners of Dying", consists of a more hackneyed premise, creative variations on a convicted criminal's last hours, including his execution. In true "Rashomon" style, each one is written in the form of a letter to the prisoner's mother from the warden of a correctional institution. In each version of his story, the main character details his last meal, whether he ate it, how much time he spent with the chaplain, what attitude he displayed in expectation of the inevitable and precisely how he died. One variation has him choking on a potato, another laughing hysterically, and so on. It's a bit like "Groundhog Day" only in this case, the prisoner ponders different aspects of his life with each variation. The last story, "The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last Till Kingdom Come" gets its title from a strange device that an old woman has, a machine that makes mirrors and runs on memories. Structured like a play with different voices, the old woman tells her life story on the left side of the page and her grandson on the right. Like the famous "Far Side" cartoon with Ginger the dog, when the grandmother talks, all the boy hears is "blah-blah-blah". Of course, the ending is inevitable the grandson appreciating the device and then ultimately recognizing his grandmother to be a more interesting person than he realized.

You can see the wheels at work in these four stories and certainly the start of what would culminate with "Life of Pi". Familiar elements are evident - the ironic sense of play characters use when facing death, whimsical plot turns that have greater gravity than they appear, odd facts that meld apparent non-sequiturs into a cohesive storyline. This is definitely worthwhile reading for anyone who wants to see how Martel started creating his universe.

The names of the stories in this collection should serve as a warning: here there be pretentiousness.

I can recommend the second story, "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton." The others, especially "Manner of Dying," were pretty pointless. The last two stories in this book were written primarily using a word processor's copy/paste function, ergo they are a waste of time.

I thought Life of Pi was great and deserving of the hype, so Martel isn't on my black list; However, this early work is less polished and shows only glimpses of his talent.

This is an interesting collection of short stories, and fans of "Life of Pi" will find it well worth a look. However, while "Pi" was brimming with vitality, joy, and humor (as well as the odd bout of ghastly violence to put it all in context), "The Facts..." seems bleak, pessimistic, and largely devoid of the charm of the later novel.

All of the stories are well-crafted, with the instantly enrapturing style that made "Pi" so popular. There can be little doubt that Martel is an excellent writer, especially keeping in mind that this is a sampling of his earlier work. However, many of these stories fail to make a connection of relevance to the reader - high-minded is one way of describing this; obtuse is another. The achingly self-conscious, navel-gazing tone of the preface is a good indicator of what will follow.

I had no problem accepting that a boy might survive a trans-Pacific voyage on a lifeboat with a tiger, but the title novella's premise (two young men construct elaborate stories, based on historical events, about an Italian family in Helsinki, in order to distract themselves from the inevitable fate of the AIDS victim) is much less plausible.

The second story (which I'm thinking of as "....One Discordant Violin") is excellent, easily the best of the collection. It seems to me less about Vietnam and its aftermath (as the Amazon review suggests) and more about the tragedy of unrecognized genius in any form, and of beauty that goes uncherished and unnurtured. It is a beautiful, carefully crafted piece of writing. (It also has the great line, "Vacuum cleaners are like dogs. The smaller they are, the louder.")

I cared less for "Ways of Dying," which reminded me of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" but was far less fun. It's unclear whether Martel is making a statement about the death penalty or just pondering the various ways in which a pivotal moment in an individual's life (or death) may develop. The repetition of the execution scene is carried too far - it becomes rote and therefore ineffective.

The final story, featuring a mother, her son, and a semi-magical mirror machine, is a well-developed object-lesson that obliquely instructs the reader to cherish our family and memories.

So, on the whole: worth a read? Certainly. Hours of fun for the whole family? Not really.

As a fan of Life of Pi and a bigger fan of the short story genre, I had high hopes for Yann Martel's collection of four (individually) award-winning stories. The oddly titled first one, which shares its name with the book, follows a just-graduating college student's friendship with a first-year schoolmate, who finds out once he's already quite sick that he's suffering from AIDS, acquired as a result of a post-automobile accident transfusion. The elder student proposes that they write a story about the fictional Roccamatio family of Helsinki, the men providing details for alternating years, for the 1901-2001 time period. The friendship works, as do the (generally sad) facts about the family and the world, but the connection between the two is beyond comprehension, at least mine. The second, which I disliked the least (barring references to a female hygiene product) concerns a man who, while on a visit to NYC, during which he tries to cram as many off-the-beaten-path activities into his stay, stumbles upon a concert to be held in a run-down building by run-down people. His intrigue with the violinist composer, an alcoholic veteran of the war in Vietnam, leads him to the man's place of work, where they ponder the man's musical career and skills and the meaning of life. The third, Manners of Dying, is actually a collection of letters written by a prison warden to the mother of an executed death row inmate. The letters, with specifics about the son's requested final meal, behavior during his final hours, and death, differ slightly in small but significant ways. By far the worst is the final story, about a man who, while visiting his grandmother, finds her mirror-making machine and gets to see the "pictures" of her life in them. The reader, unfortunately, must suffer not only through the story itself, but also see the word "blah" written over 1000 times. Those, like me, who enjoy quirky stories but didn't these, might try Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, or Martel's novel, Life of Pi.

Although "Facts" was the first book Martel wrote, I read it last. Now I will never be able to have the experience of astonishment that I would have had if I had picked up this collection of stories by an unknown author -- oh damn!

OK, boohoo aside, as it is, the astonishment and the almost overwhelming feeling of "how did he DO THAT?" is carrying me along. Martel takes a few characters, for whom he obviously feels great affection (one of the most wonderful things about him -- his undying love for his characters), and he reveals them in glints, gleams and beams, treating you to one flash of light after another, modulating everything -- his book is like a written version of a crystal chandelier in sunlight. No one dazzling rainbow lasts but they all build and they don't falter; you want to gaze at them much longer than it takes to finish reading.

The title story, "The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios," is a simple one. The narrator's dear friend dies of AIDS while both the patient and his friend engage in a revealing and urgent story-telling activity. I had the feeling of two young men going back, somehow, to their ancestral feelings of community involving sitting around the (dying) fire and story telling as night fell. Yet there was a feeling of intense energy in every page, in every paragraph. You cannot lose your place reading Martel.

Another story is a sort of emotional expose of a death warrant warden writing letters of condolence to the "orphaned" mother of a man executed by hanging. The letters are peculiar, and riveting. You feel yourself being emotionally knit to the condemned man even as you begin the letter knowing he is already dead. But the crescendo in this series of puzzling letters is somehow not cruel to the reader. It will take me ten, twenty more readings to be able to figure out more about my relationship with this many-times-hanged man and the officious (but gently so) narrator-protagonist.

If you read all of Martel's work, you may see some things reminding you of others. And all of it reminds you of the human family somehow. His work is read lightly and easily and then it settles, and keeps settling, and keeps settling and settling -- like another beautiful sunset, another yes, another yes again. Read this magnificent collection.