Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Miami Herald - December 26, 2004
Connie Ogle, cogle@herald.com
THE FACTS BEHIND THE HELSINKI ROCCAMATIOS.
Yann Martel. Harcourt. 208 pages. $22.
Yann Martel's bestselling, breakout novel Life of Pi explored the dilemma of surviving a shipwreck in a lifeboat with a hungry Bengal tiger. So it is not surprising that this collection of short fiction, first published in 1993, should probe death's mysteries and anguish and the redemption that can spring from tragedy.
Martel, who won the Man Booker Prize for Pi in 2002, admits in an author's note that he tinkered with the novella and three stories in The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and reports that "the youthful urge to overstate" was conquered, "the occasional clumsiness in the prose I hope ironed out." Hard to imagine what he edited, but these unconventional stories are neither clumsy nor overstated. Even the two experimental pieces are surprisingly crisp, absorbing and moving: the crafty The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come, about a grandmother/grandson relationship, is original in style but features a bittersweet ending that's universal in its power. Like Pi, the stories pose intriguing questions about the nature of reality and the effects of the past, requiring the reader to reconsider his existence.
Death shows up peripherally in The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composter John Morton, in which the narrator visits Washington, D.C., and stumbles upon a remarkable performance dedicated to a dead soldier. That lush tribute contrasts harshly with the narrator's friendship with his host, who is consumed with work and too busy to spend much time with him.
In Manners of Dying, a prison warden writes and rewrites a letter to the mother of a Death Row prisoner, detailing the minutiae of her son's execution. With each letter -- the last is version 1,096 -- we realize that it's all minutiae in the end, and yet it matters deeply how we face that inexorable final moment.
Most satisfying is the touching title story, in which the narrator befriends Paul, a young man with AIDS. As Paul's health deteriorates, his friend decides that they will reconstruct Boccaccio's Decameron, in which survivors of the Black Plague huddle in a remote villa, telling tales to pass the time. "[W]ith our stories we would be remembering the world, re-creating it, embracing it. . . . [T]hat was how Paul and I would destroy the void." They create the Roccamatio family, whose history will span 100 years, with each chapter linked to an historic event -- the creation of the first animated sound cartoon, Hitler's rise to power, the invention of scuba diving -- from each year.
But can mere words soften the threat of mortality? As Paul grows weaker -- 'Look up in the dictionary the word 'flesh' . . . and then look up the word 'melt' " -- his entries grow bleak. Devastation. Destruction. Death. His imagination reflects his shattered spirit, and the narrator begins to feel the void, wide and cold and uncomfortably near.
What happens in the end, though, carries unexpected hope. The assured, gifted Martel seems to be offering a promise: Don't give up, and you will be rewarded. It's a lesson Martel knows intimately. After he faced rejection as a writer for years, the four stories republished here made a name for him and provided the wherewithal for Life of Pi. Sweet redemption for him and for us, too.
Connie Ogle is The Herald's book editor.
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