The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

"The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and Other Stories" is a book of short stories by Canadian author Yann Martel. First published as a paperback by Knopf Canada in the spring of 1993, it garnered little attention outside Canada until 2004, after Martel's award-winning "Life of Pi" gained worldwide popularity and people became interested in the author's work.

The book is composed of four short stories. The 2004 Canongate Books edition is updated with an author's note in which Martel writes that he is "happy to offer these four stories again to the reading public, slightly revised, the youthful urge to overstate reined in, the occasional clumsiness in prose, I hope, ironed out." All the stories except "Manners of Dying" have a distinct auto-biographical feel to them, the protagonist being a young white male university student having an existential crisis. In these stories, especially the first two, references to other cultural noteworthies such as "The Little Prince" and "Almayer's Folly" are noticeable.

"The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios"

The title story revolves around a man who invents stories about a family of Italian immigrants living in Helsinki, Finland to help pass the time with a friend who is dying of AIDS. In order to guide the plot of their strange attempt at fiction they use Encyclopædia Britannica extracts from each year starting from 1901 until present (1986) metaphorically to write each chapter. That story won the Canadian Journey Prize in 1991. In his author's note, Martel states that "Helsinki" was adapted to the stage and to the screen.

"The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton"

This story is about a young man who visits a friend in Washington D.C.. The friend works at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and is busy with his demanding job. The young man, by coincidence, stumbles upon a performance of classical music by Vietnam War-veterans and is thrilled by the composer's sheer ingenuity.

"Manners of Dying"

In this epistolary novel Mr. Harry Parlington, warden at the Cantos Correctional Institution, writes different letters to a Mrs. Barlow describing how her son, Kevin, executed in prison, experienced and faced his death, his various "manners" of "dying." Examples of the chapter titles are: "Manner of Dying 985", "Manner of Dying 760". It is not clear which of those "manners of dying" Kevin Barlow actually experienced (if any); they are presented with ambiguity, as potential and often conflicting possibilities. This story was adapted to a film by Jeremy Peter Allen.

"The Vita Æterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come"

An anecdotal story about a young man who visits his talkative grandmother and while rummaging in her attic finds a machine that makes mirrors out of 4 ingredients: oil, sand, silver and memories. When she demonstrates the machine to him, he learns about her hurtful past from the memories she tells.

External links

* [http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth03A14L010512634824 Yann Martel]
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* [http://www.mannersofdying.com "Manners of Dying"] Feature-Film Adaptation