The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios is a collection of four stories by Yann Martel. I loved the title story, thought another one was ok, and the other two were quite weak.
The title story is also thankfully the longest story here. It’s about a man remembering his best friend’s slow death by AIDS in the 1980s, when there were no effective therapeutics available. In the manner of Boccaccio’s Decameron, they decide to tell each other fictional stories in the shadow of impending death, which takes the form of a fictional Italian family - the Roccamatios - living in Helsinki, the capital of Finland.
The narrator and Paul, the man dying of AIDS, take turns telling each other the chapters of the Roccamatios family saga, each chapter representing a year of the 20th century, beginning in 1901, with a notable real-life event (the “facts”) kicking off the chapter. Except the facts are all we get - the story of the Roccamatios is purposefully withheld.
It’s a clever structural choice. Martel conveys the feeling of absence the narrator feels, because his friend is dead, in the reader by talking about an epic story they concocted and then refusing to tell it. That said, the story surrounding it is always compelling and, especially towards the end, very moving. It’s a masterclass in style and substance working beautifully in tandem.
Unfortunately, Martel follows up this superb story with the worst one in the book, The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton. I know, it’s quite the title.
It’s about a man going to a run-down theatre to watch an amateur musical ensemble perform some classical pieces and then John Morton’s own work. Morton is an office cleaner and Vietnam vet who is nonetheless a virtuoso composer, but will likely never be recognised in his lifetime. There’s not much else to the story except to say that writing is the least effective way of conveying how music feels to listen to, and Martel, as skilful a writer as he can be, proves that again with this story.
Manners of Dying was the only other story I found enjoyable. It’s an epistolary piece told by the warden of a prison writing to the mother of a prisoner that he’s executed that day. Except there are nine letters, each one describing the final hours of the prisoner’s life and manner of dying in nine different ways, as if in a terrible Groundhog Day scenario.
It becomes increasingly compelling once you realise you’re reading the same day over and over with slight differences each time and I began wondering what the point of it was, like it was a literary puzzle. The first clue was the name of the prison: Cantos Correctional Institution. I associate the word “canto” most strongly with Dante, and then I noticed how many letters there were: nine. Like the same number of circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno. That can’t be a coincidence.
I’ve never read Dante so perhaps if I was more au fait with The Divine Comedy I’d have spotted more clues as to the purpose of the story. But it seems to me that the story is a version of the Inferno, although who the person being tortured is unclear: is it the prisoner, the warden or the prisoner’s mother being forced to relive this day and its associated pains over and over? An intriguing story regardless.
The book closes out on a dreary note with The Vita Æterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come. It’s a lesser version of the Roccamatios story in that it’s also about a narrator remembering a dead person they were close to, and has a clever narrative structure, but wasn’t nearly as interesting to read.
The page is divided up with the grandmother’s voice on the left and the man’s voice on the right, with the grandmother’s voice often simply saying “blah blah blah” as the man allows his mind to drift. Ultimately it’s a story of regret as the man wishes he had paid more attention to his grandmother’s life story as she’s gone now and he’ll never know it, in the same way the reader will never know it because all we get is “blah blah blah”. I appreciated the imaginative way Martel structured his story though I didn’t find any aspect of it especially engaging.
Life of Pi is undoubtedly Yann Martel’s masterwork but this earlier short story collection is also worth reading, for the title story alone, although some of the other stories included have something to offer as well. The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios is a thoughtful and occasionally quite powerful read.
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