Finally...

The book which I just read finish

The Author Yann Martel

"I just read finish my novel,
so happy that I finally read finish,
It is a great novel & good stories,
what are you waiting for,
grab 1 of it and read guys/girls."

This is what story talking about :

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

The title story is the longest, about the first person narrator accompanying a young man Paul, who is dying of AIDs, through his last days. To help Paul cope with the endless days in hospital, the narrator decides that they will write a book together about a fictional family, the Roccamatios from Helsinki. Each chapter is to be based on one year of the last century, using a major world event that year as the base from which to build the story.

The actual story of the Roccamatios is never told. The historical facts for each year are listed, which makes this story good for increasing your general knowledge. Sandwiched between these facts is the description of a person dying from AIDs. This provides a fascinating juxtaposition of fact and fiction, events on a grand global scale contrasted with the minute details of the life of an individual, the triumph of world progress measured against the tragedy of one person’s death, the certainty of a past viewed from the present compared to the present fear of the unknown future.

I don’t know if Martel has first hand experience of watching a person die from AIDs or is simply a master at research and imagination, but the account is certainly believable, and very sad.

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

The incredibly long title of this story makes it deliciously eccentric even before you read the first sentence. It is about an unknown composer whose unknown composition is played badly by an unknown ensemble in an unknown decrepit theatre; yet when played, the piece hits those who hear it with the impact of an oncoming train, and fills the heart with both despairing sorrow and soaring delight.

The narrator later finds out that the man who wrote and performed that brilliant piece of music is a janitor. Although the story is purely fictional, it makes you wonder how many people there are out there who have genius which is never discovered by the world because of their circumstances and lack of opportunity.

Manners of Dying

A series of nine letters, written by a warden of a prison to the mother of a young man who was executed by hanging, provides a sobering glimpse into a world that few of us will ever see - how a person behaves in the last few hours before he goes to the gallows.

All nine letters are addressed to Mrs Barlow (possibly a play on the words “bars” and “gallows”) and refer to the young man as Kevin. I’m not sure if this is for simplicity so the author does not have to invent nine different mothers and sons, or if the novella is meant for the reader as an individual, suggesting that there are many ways to die and asking us to decide which letter we want to describe how we ourselves will behave in the face of fear and death.

The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company

This provides an interesting mental dialogue between a young man and his grandmother. Text on the left side of the page are the words of the grandmother, while text on the right side are the young man’s thoughts as she is speaking. Text which fills the whole horizontal space is the young man speaking from a later time as the narrator of the story.

Martel cleverly uses this layout to convey firstly, two persons’ simultaneous thinking processes and secondly, one person’s thoughts at different points in time. The genius is not in the story itself, but in the use of the spatial potential of a printed page.