This is a collection of early stories from Yann Martell, most famous for Life of Pi. If you look at his general output of writing, across thirty years, he hasn’t published all that much, but of course Life of Pi is a) a huge success, b) won the Booker Prize and became an Oscar winning movie, and c) is quite good. It also begins with Yann Martell the narrator of the book discussing his frustration with publishing and finding things to write about.
This book begins with an introduction expressing similar frustrations and then talks about lots of early rejections. This book predates Life of Pi by about a decade but was also reissued after the novel came out. He explains that he went back to his previous work and chose four to represent those. The title story is quite long, so the book is regular story collection length even if it doesn’t have a larger number of stories. These being his best four doesn’t really bode well for his short story output.
Of the four stories, I think two of them are kind of bad, one has some frustrating flaws, and one is solid.
The title story, the longest, is about a young college student who befriends a younger student who soon thereafter is diagnosed with AIDS and looks like the prognosis is quite bad. One of the more frustrating elements of this story, and it’s a product of its time, is the detailed explanation that the friend’s illness was from a blood transfusion on a Caribbean island after a car wreck. This is frustrating because is doubly insists of the exoticness and foreignness of AIDS. The character deals with his own reactions and the honesty about being scared and running through the kinds of panic everyone was going through in response to AIDS, especially when one confronted it is good and human, but the writerly elements to make sure the friend is “innocent” is sadly disturbing. That also speaks to another frustration, which is this is a whole story about sad he is that his friend dies of AIDS. This doesn’t have the kinds of courage we get from better stories.
The other story that is good involves a young narrator going to Washington DC and randomly deciding to go to an ad hoc concert put on by a group of veterans in an old theater.
I won’t mention the other stories….they’re just too….”WRITER!!”