THE FACTS BEHIND THE HELSINKI ROCCAMATIOS
By Yann Martel. Harcourt. 208 pp. $22
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. •
Steven Moore is the author of several books and essays on contemporary literature.
