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Self

yann martel

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A modern-day Orlando -- edgy, funny and startlingly honest -- Self is the fictional autobiography of a young writer and traveller who finds his gender changed overnight.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

331 pages, Paperback

First published April 23,1996

This edition

Format
331 pages, Paperback
Published
April 7, 2003 by Faber \u0026 Faber
ISBN
9780571219766
ASIN
0571219764
Language
English

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About the author

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yann martel

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Yann Martel is a Canadian author who wrote the Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. Life of Pi was adapted for a movie directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
Martel is also the author of the novels The High Mountains of Portugal, Beatrice and Virgil, and Self, the collection of stories The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and a collection of letters to Canada's Prime Minister 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. He has won a number of literary prizes, including the 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the 2002 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature.
Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with writer Alice Kuipers and their four children. His first language is French, but he writes in English.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
27(27%)
4 stars
36(36%)
3 stars
37(37%)
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100 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
achromozome
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I really enjoyed this book. The writing made me fall in love with Yann Martel, and I could feel this very interesting tension with the narrator being so distinct and well developed that the narrator was writing separate from the author. Past the writing style, the content was extremely interesting and poignant especially in start while talking about childhood and the development of the human and the curiosities of childhood (reminded me of Augustine’s Confessions a bit). However, I lost clear understanding of what Martel was trying to accomplish by the middle of the book, and especially the end with the assault felt rushed and confusing.

Idk. I loved it so much as a piece of work, only sullied by its content slightly.
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Namulith
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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To me Self is an example of a novel being stronger as fragments, rather than the sum of its parts. Martel's first book is an adventurous experiment in narrative, one that features numerous languages and constantly forces the reader to question it. As a full length novel, I think Self fails because it is just too ambitiously scattered. Perhaps intentionally, the book is similar to the attempted stories written by the narrator. There is plenty thought and big ideas behind the writing, but they take precedent over forming a cohesive novel. The result is a book that feels like an attempt at literary shownmanship.

For me the high points of the book are small moments. Martel is certainly not a bad writer, and there are passages that I found beautiful in their depiction of life and the narrator's point of view. He has a very unique voice that combines a lot of literary allusion with more down to earth settings (this reminds a bit off Anne Carson's "Autobiography of Red", a Greek myth portrayed in a modern setting). I also enjoyed some of the tangents in experimental writing, having the parallel columns of Hungarian and English was quite neat. Unlike some passages which just translated the foreign language (to a point) I'm certain the Hungarian is completely different (mostly due to the conversational nature, proper nouns etc), providing a great reinforcement of the scene the narrator is describing in English. Likewise the point near the end which splits things into narration on one side and the psychological reaction on the other is also quite interesting.

That said, in the end I couldn't completely say I enjoyed the book. Martel himself has even been noted as saying he isn't particularly keen on the book, and I feel like it's a prime example of a talented young author attempting to overreach himself.
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CharonPluto
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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At first, I was enjoying it... then I thought, How dare he? What the hell does he know? The joys, the wonderful gift of menstruations, the lovely cramps, the beautiful flow of stinky blood? Why doesn't he take it a step further and talk about the wonderful and pleasureable journey of cervical cancer, chemoradiation, brachytherapy and the close and loving relationship one develops with one's tumour why doesn't he?

I am usually very open minded and very eclectic about my reading and opinions, but this book rubbed me the wrong way. It's just so simplistic and ridiculous. It's like reading the same stupid meme all the way through.

Martel just doesn't have a clue as to what he is writing about : women. Seriously. He should stick to tigers.

He tried, he failed.
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TimChan
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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The blurb asks, ‘Fiction or autobiography?’ and sort of replies, ‘both, neither?’. The whole point of this extraordinary created work is to ask, and attempt to answer, some basic questions relating to literature, storytelling, identity, and life itself. It’s an ambitious aim and one I suspect many readers will find difficult, demanding, upsetting and maybe even incomprehensible.
We begin in the first person in the company of a young boy, live with him through his early teens and schooling, a huge loss and tragedy, and his fate as the isolated offspring of high-flying achievers, his early experiences of sex, identity, and the casual physical and mental cruelty so often associated with boarding schools.
Abruptly, we are plunged into the life of a young woman in her late teens, still in the first person. Surprisingly, this overnight transition, both physical and mental, I hardly questioned, apart from a short pause during the reading to reflect on the nature of gender. We then travel with this developing young woman as she experiences life, love, sex, disappointment, and all the joys and sorrows life can throw at a sensitive, intelligent, questioning, and creative soul who dares enter the world of writing. Her journey as a budding novelist will strike a chord with most who have travelled that difficult and demanding route.
She encounters real love in an unexpected but joyous and serendipitous relationship. But her entire life is effectively ended by a violent and graphically portrayed rape that is the most emotionally disturbing such account I’ve read.
The novel ends on an indeterminate note, leaving the reader informed, curious, astounded, educated, elevated, disappointed, and despairing but no nearer to the answers posed by the original questions, merely, perhaps, better equipped to consider them.
A challenging and engaging read.
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kyhism
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This book is - interesting, but let me down. I loved the writing and I'll try more of Martel, but not so much the story. It was too incoherent, felt pointless. It dragged around too much, and while it wasn't an heavy read, the complete lack of plot makes it hard to keep reading. Some parts where good - the first half, in which the main character's childhood in explored, and the last part, up to the abrupt ending.

Once the main character suddenly, without explanation, changes gender, the book becomes more tedious, long, pointless and confusing. I wasn't sure where it was going, and by the time I reached the end, I was convinced I'd missed something, because I simply did not get it and could not find myself caring about what passed as a plot.

In the last quarter or so of the book, something happens to the main character, who is brutally raped by a stranger. That part, although only lasting the 50-odd final pages, felt very real, very well done to me. It was brutal and unexpected, didn't seem to fit with the rest of the book, but there you have it.

I'm not certain about the ending itself. Perhaps I missed something there as well, and should read it again?

It took me a while to read it. I started on a trip and forgot about it once I came back home.

Somehow, it feels fitting.
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aladahime
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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If, as I suspect, you have read and enjoyed Yann Martel’s “The Life of Pi” as much as I did, then you will probably also enjoy “Self”, his first novel.

Without giving too much away it is difficult to say much about the plot, which feels autiobiographical, to an extent but (as you will see) there are very well defined limits to just how autobiographical it can be.

I am certain that there are hidden depths that I couldn’t quite fathom, regarding fractured consciousnesses and sexual politics, but I mainly enjoyed the uncomplicated style and effortless storytelling skills that are the hallmark of The Life of Pi.
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grwawr
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I can't think of a book I had more difficulty getting through. I was very disturbed by the very ending. The initial gender transformation was one thing but back again took me totally by surprise.

I would have written the ending quite differently - after the final gender transformation, I would have made the main character make the handle bar mustache guy wish he'd never been born. That pig would have been subjected to things that aren't printable here in this review.

Not my type of book at all - nothing at all like Life of Pi. I dislike no chapters (there is essentially one chapter - chapter 2 is a paragraph.
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