[In the following review of The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, the critic contends that all four stories in the volume are enjoyable and moving.]

Yann Martel, is a Quebecois, educated in English, who writes, on the evidence of these four shortish stories [in The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and Other Stories]—his first published work—like a more compassionate Paul Auster. He explores the emotional and cultural impulse behind creativity but not as a self-conscious postmodern exercise. He sees it rather as an ordinary human activity, believing that we are all constantly creative in our daily lives.

The title-story is about the death of a young man from AIDS. His best friend sits with him over several months while his condition worsens and the two men tell each other invented stories about the Italian Roccamatio family, each tale prompted by a particular event in a year from this century. The friend, our narrator, doesn't tell us the Roccamatio stories, we only get the named events: “1930—The American Clyde Tombaugh discovers the ninth planet of our solar system, Pluto”, “1941—Marshall Pétain institutes Mother's Day”. It is clear that the untold stories about the Roccamatios are not simply analogous to their starting-point; similarly, the AIDS patient's stories have only an indirect relationship to his suffering (he tells a quirky tale when he is near to death). Martel shows how free and yet connected to our history we are when we create, and what creative treasures the dying man is leaving behind as he relinquishes his power of story-telling. All four stories are enjoyable and touching, dealing with a wide range of subjects from a beautiful concerto, to the ways in which a condemned man deals with his final night, to a machine which makes mirrors. These are literary tales by a literary writer, but they have the crucial saving grace of narrative momentum. It is an impressive debut.