The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
by Yann Martel

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
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Book Summary Information

Author: Yann Martel
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-09-05
ISBN: 0156032457
Number of pages: 228
Publisher: Mariner Books

Book Reviews of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

Book Review: New, different, and worth reading
Summary: 4 Stars

Concise, exact, strange and engaging. It's hard to describe Yann Martel's writing, but it leaves the reader with a feeling, a deeper sort of understanding of the world, or perhaps a recognition of the confusion by it.

In this collection of four totally different novellas, Martel turns bits and pieces here and there into four, complete-yet-not-complete, first-person accounts. The plots are vague, the emotions are present but not overdone: they are what create the stories in the end.

Readers expecting another "Life of Pi" will be disappointed. Not only is this not a novel, but it's also a different style than Martel's best-seller. It's not so much the story but everything behind the story.

Martel chooses his words well; he raves over the meticulous art of punctuation; and the corollary is a mix of light-heartedness and humor in the face of despair and hopelessness. It's a strange combination, but everything about Martel's book is strange. The characters and their stories come out of nowhere; then they leave you behind with a turn of the page.

The novellas come in order of longest to shortest, but in all of them, carefully, Martel sprinkles specific details about. He sees writing as not the flow of endless words, but as an art, and with close attention paid to the syntax, punctuation, and dialogue, he ties threads of life together into four delightfully different and unique stories that end quickly on the pages but linger in the reader's mind.

Summary of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

Here are four unforgettable stories by the author of Life of Pi. Written earlier in Martel's career, these tales display that startling mix of dazzle and depth that have made Yann Martel an international phenomenon.

Inventive in form and timeless in content, each story is moving and thought-provoking. A Canadian university student visiting Washington, D.C., experiences the Vietnam War through an intense musical encounter. 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. A young man's fascination with the mirror-making machine he finds in his grandmother's attic is juxtaposed with the reminiscences it evokes from his grandmother. And, in the exquisite title story, a 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.



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

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