Yann Martel's terrific Life Of Pi easily earned its long tenure on nationwide bestseller lists. Its tale of an Indian boy stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger captures the imagination, but also bears a subtle and reflexive message about the salutary importance of storytelling. The idea isn't new to Martel; The Facts Behind The Helsinki Roccamatios—a four-story anthology initially published in Canada in 1993, and only now debuting in America—showcases his early, less-successful experiments with similar themes.
The book's eponymous novella takes the motif most literally. When a college freshman is diagnosed with AIDS, his best friend distracts him with a joint storytelling project: Together, the stricken Paul and his unnamed narrator friend invent a fictional Finnish/Italian family whose history is based on world events from 1901 to 2001. As Paul's health worsens and cynicism and despair take hold, he draws on World War I, Gandhi's assassination, and the rise of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler for pessimistic inspiration, while the narrator counters with the flight of the Kitty Hawk and the origins of medical insulin, Dada, and the zipper. It's disappointing that Martel doesn't actually tell the Roccamatios' stories ("certain intimacies shouldn't be made public," the narrator says, reducing Martel's narrative burden a hundredfold in the process), but by paralleling Paul's mood and health fluctuations with humanity's progress and setbacks, he builds a story that's deceptively simple and personal in spite of its awkward structure and overbearing symbolism.
The collection's shorter pieces are more colorful and whimsical. "The Time I Heard The Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto With One Discordant Violin, By The American Composer John Morton" balances its unwieldy title with a deft story about a janitor whose musical compositions express a history that isn't verbalized in his daily life. "Manners Of Dying" consists of nine alternate descriptions of an execution, each one a separate variant on a theme. And "The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company" veers farthest from reality, with its story of a magical mirror machine powered by verbalized memories. Each story centers on a storyteller whose agendas and perspectives are at least as important as the stories themselves. And in each case, there's a sense of a hidden truth behind what they voluntarily reveal. The stories in Roccamatios are amongst Martel's first—he characterizes them as his "world premiere"—and they often seem clumsy and artless compared to his more recent work. But like Life Of Pi, they have a discomfiting, fascinating message about truth in fiction, and they carefully slip it in behind characters who seem significantly more real than the stories they choose to tell.