Given the spectacular success of Canadian writer Yann Martel's bestselling novel Life of Pi (winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize and Amazon.com's Best Book of 2002) it's no surprise that his early short story collection, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, would attract new readers. Originally published in 1993, these four well-crafted stories have been slightly revised by him for this new edition (the book's first publication in America). Only one of these stories, "Manners of Dying," reads like apprentice work, but even this piece is highly accomplished and full of interest. Every page here shows the development of Martel's stealthy, understated prose (think Paul Auster with a Canadian quietude). In fact, the title story begins so calmly and matter-of-factly that the opening pages feel almost listless. A college senior describes his budding friendship with the freshman he has been assigned to shepherd through the first months of the school year. When the new friend is diagnosed with AIDSs (it is the mid-1980s, and this is a more-or-less immediate death sentence) the emotional stakes gradually increase, not only in predictable ways, as the reluctant narrator is drawn further into his friend's life, but in the jokes, arguments, and revelations brought to light by their collaboration in a sparkling intellectual game--a story the friends write together, in alternating turns--that provides a delicate scaffold for the private drama of death. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
Pathos is leavened with inventiveness and humor in this collection of a novella and three short stories first published in a slightly different version in Canada in 1993, nearly 10 years before Martel's Booker-winning Life of Pi. The minor key is established in the title novella, a graceful, multilayered story of a young man dying of AIDS, told through the refracting lens of the history of the 20th century. Infected by a blood transfusion, Paul receives the diagnosis during his freshman year of college. The narrator, Paul's student mentor, devises a plan to keep Paul engaged in life—they will invent the story of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, which will have 100 chapters, each thematically linked to an event of the 20th century. The connection between the history, the stories and Paul's condition is subtle and always shifting, as fluid and elusive as life itself. The experience of death is delicately probed in the next two stories as well: in one, a Canadian student's life is changed when he hears the Rankin Concerto, written in honor of a Vietnam veteran; in the other, a prison warden reports to a mother on her son's last moments before he is executed. The book closes with a surreal fable in which mirrors are made from memories. These are exemplary works of apprenticeship, slight yet richly satisfying. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Martel’s 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 novel’s imaginative plotting, deep humanity, and narrative finesse. But—except, perhaps, for the deeply affecting title story—it’s 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, you’ll appreciate this dazzling, if somewhat disorienting, collection. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
*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

Review
"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

Book Description
Here are four unforgettable stories by the author of Life of Pi. In the exquisite title novella, a very young man dying of AIDS joins his friend in fashioning a story of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, set against the yearly march of the twentieth century whose horrors and miracles their story echoes. In "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American composer John Morton," a Canadian university student visits Washington, D.C., and experiences the Vietnam War and its aftermath through an intense musical encounter. In "Manners of Dying," variations of a warden's letter to the mother of a son he has just executed reveal how each life is contained in its end. The final story, "The Mirror Machine", is about a young man who discovers an antique mirror-making machine in his grandmother's attic. The man's fascination with the object is juxtaposed with the longwinded reminiscences it evokes from his grandmother.

Written earlier in Martel's career, these tales are as moving as they are thought-provoking, as inventive in form as they are timeless in content. They display that startling mix of dazzle and depth that have made Yann Martel an international phenomenon.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Here are four stories by the author of Life of Pi. In the title novella, a very young man dying of AIDS joins his friend in fashioning a story of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, set against the yearly march of the twentieth century whose horrors and miracles their story echoes. In "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American composer John Morton," a Canadian university student visits Washington, D.C., and experiences the Vietnam War and its aftermath through an intense musical encounter. In "Manners of Dying," variations of a warden's letter to the mother of a man he has just executed reveal how each life is contained in its end. The final story, "The Vita AEterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come," is about a young man who discovers an antique mirror-making machine that runs on memories and fashions a unique reflection of his relationship with his grandmother.

FROM THE CRITICS

Steven Moore - The Washington Post

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.

Janet Maslin - The New York Times

So this novella becomes an odd hybrid: part history, part Roccamatio fiction, part poignantly evoked medical crisis. ("When you're with people who are really sick," the narrator observes, "you discover what an illusion science can be.") And here, at least, Mr. Martel achieves a graceful balance. The seeds of Life of Pi can be found in the engaging narrative voice, in its curious digressions, in its mixture of unexpected playfulness with the gravity of imminent death. Will 1938 be remembered for the Nazi pogroms of Kristallnacht, or for the invention of the ballpoint pen? The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios invents an odd, wishful universe that gives these two options equivalent moral weight.

Publishers Weekly

Pathos is leavened with inventiveness and humor in this collection of a novella and three short stories first published in a slightly different version in Canada in 1993, nearly 10 years before Martel's Booker-winning Life of Pi. The minor key is established in the title novella, a graceful, multilayered story of a young man dying of AIDS, told through the refracting lens of the history of the 20th century. Infected by a blood transfusion, Paul receives the diagnosis during his freshman year of college. The narrator, Paul's student mentor, devises a plan to keep Paul engaged in life-they will invent the story of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, which will have 100 chapters, each thematically linked to an event of the 20th century. The connection between the history, the stories and Paul's condition is subtle and always shifting, as fluid and elusive as life itself. The experience of death is delicately probed in the next two stories as well: in one, a Canadian student's life is changed when he hears the Rankin Concerto, written in honor of a Vietnam veteran; in the other, a prison warden reports to a mother on her son's last moments before he is executed. The book closes with a surreal fable in which mirrors are made from memories. These are exemplary works of apprenticeship, slight yet richly satisfying. Agent, Jackie Kaiser. (Dec.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Having delivered a nail-biting narrative with Life of Pi, Martel chooses not to repeat himself, here offering four meditative stories that test the limits of the form. In the longest, the narrator and a friend slowly perishing of AIDS swap stories, centered on the imaginary Roccamatios of Helsinki, that reflect events of the 20th century. We don't get their stories, however, just the events that inspire them, which creates an appropriate sense of being shut out (just as the narrator can't really enter his friend's pain), though it can be a little distancing. In "Manners of Dying," variations of the same letter written by a prison warden to a woman whose son has just been executed reveal the horror of capital punishment. In the especially intriguing "The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company," an old woman reiterates memories (in a narrow column) to her newly alert grandson (whose thoughts fill the page). Startlingly, she even shows him a machine that makes mirrors out of memories. Elusive and thought-provoking, though sure to confound anyone who reads for plot, this collection is recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/04.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

This mixed-bag of three stories and a novella first appeared in 1993, nine years before its Canadian author's Booker Prize winner, Life of Pi. The stories are comparatively weak. "Manners of Dying" contains alternative versions of the letter a prison warden must send to the mother of a young convict over whose execution he presides. A few of the several scenarios (describing the prisoner's reaction to his imminent death) are harshly moving, but the story as a whole is distinctly gimmicky. In another, an unnamed narrator re-creates "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton." The chamber piece so identified memorializes the Vietnam War with awkward intensity, in "a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error." Martel's development of the premise is disappointingly banal. "The Via Aeterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come" describes, in a mixture of prose and verse, its narrator's slow comprehension of his grandmother's long widowhood and stoical old age, the facts of which are "stored" in a marvelous machine that "runs on" her memories. It's a thin fantasy, filled with redundant padding, that reads like an abandoned Ray Bradbury effort. Then there's the title novella, set in 1986, about a college student's slow dying from AIDS (contracted during an emergency blood transfusion), as described by the friend who endures the ordeal with him, ceaselessly visiting and offering support, concocting an ongoing story about an imaginary Finnish family: "a story in eighty-six episodes, each echoing one event from one year of the unfolding century." As his friend's "contributions" remain hopeful andencouraging, the patient's own tales grow increasingly despairing and apocalyptic: the surrounding story's progression is precise, impressively imagined, and immensely moving. Overall, a disappointment. "The Facts," though, represents the best reason we've been given yet to keep reading Martel. Agency: Westwood Creative Artists

AUTHOR DESCRIPTION