I am completely enamored with Yann Martel thus far, having read Life Of Pi and What Is Stephen Harper Reading? and Self did not disappoint!

The story is very enthralling and very reminiscent of Orlando, but with the wit and stylish writing of Yann Martel. I could never put this book down. I also found with this book LBGT issues were tackled very well, and Martel goes through the experiences of Gay, Lesbian, and even Transgender persons in a very classy and thoughtful manner.

I also enjoyed very much that Self read very much like a Biography and an essay on the exploration of the different selfs (and the death/rebirth of others).

I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone, and then I would make you read Life of Pi!

Couldn't finish it, maybe I just wasn't in the mood but it just seemed too disjointed.

This book has spoken to my soul since the first time I picked it up when I was 18 or 19. I've read it at different stages of my life, and each time, I get something different from it. It's a book about transformation and growing up, gender and identity, travel and writing, love and loss. It's the book that made me want to be a writer, and it's the book I aspire to write someday -- not for its themes or narrative structure, but for the way it makes me feel each time I read it. It was my favorite book at 18, and it's my favorite book still.

coming off of life of pi, i had high expectations. i saw potential in the opening pages, in the play with gender identity, but it wasn't long before it fell flat. and i mean FLAT. remember in life of pi, when you're lost at sea convinced you'll never be found and drenched in boredom, excruciating boredom? well, that happens here too only without all the confidence that a couple hundred pages of compelling fiction can give you.

i say skip it. or read it and prove me wrong.

Self has good characterization and fluid writing, but nothing to hold it all together. The descriptions are vibrant but not thought-provoking. I enjoyed the use of the novel as a format to adumbrate imaginary stories and novels (those "written" by the narrator) which would never work as actual books, a technique also found in Slaughterhouse Five and the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. In Self, Martel uses various experimental postmodernistic techniques (such as starting Chapter Two on the last page, splitting the internal monologues into two columns in two voices, and segmenting the narrative into lists and plays) seemingly without any reason behind their use. Including several blank pages at the end of the book comes across paradoxically as being simultaneously unorthodox and clichéd, unorthodox because I've never seen another book do it (aside from one or two blank pages needed to bind the book properly), clichéd because it's just the physical representation of the overused concept that future life is like the blank pages of a book. The book as a whole has no sense of cohesion or purpose, no soul.

Some as aspects I liked- but overall found myself skim reading a lot of the book, specifically where he blabbed on about writing his novel/ short story and some of the academic lists that, really, we didn't need to know about. Original in parts- toying with the idea of getting my Hungarian friend to translate parts. (With the french bi-lingual passages I did enjoy trying to translate myself before reading the English- but the Hungarian did not at all tally with the English- wondering what I missed there. The approach to gender was interesting. Confusing, yes- rather brave.
Preferred his other 2 books and thought that this had the potential to be a very good book had it been redrafted/ edited further.

Er, it seems that I am one of the only people on goodreads that loved this book. And love it I did. I couldn't put it down. I enjoyed every aspect of it, from the fluidity of gender, to the beauty of involving different languages, to the pain and bliss of love, sexual awakening and travel. It was a rollicking good read. I felt like I actually knew the narrator inside and out, which is something that I've found lacking in a lot of the books that I have read recently.

The rape scene at the end was indeed painful to read, and a real disheartening ending to the book. But I liked it. It dealt with loss and heartache and real things. Don't pick up this book if you want a pick-me-up or a light read, but do read this book if you want a fascinating portrayal of what it is to be human.

I HAD to read it for an English course and threw it out afterwards! It was a disturbing, crude, and cheap imitation of Virginia Wolf's "Orlando."

It is SO HARD FOR ME TO LIKE THIS BOOK. It's like somebody told Yann Martel: "You know what's really hot in contemporary lit right now? Poetry, transgender issues, and made-up memoirs. YOU should write one."

People read autobiographies because the personalities behind them have led fascinating, meaningful existences. If you're going to MAKE UP an autobiography, you have the opportunity to magically create some of that aforementioned fascinating-ness: "There, have some meaning! BAMMO, be a fascinating character!" Look, Martel has the chance to invent a whole life: instead of inventing an interesting one, he obliges us to observe the flat, emotionless life of a 20-something who stumbles through the story with a barely-there passiveness, where the only non-ordinary thing that occurs is an inexplicable gender change.

Wow. What a book!! Yann Martel is such a poetic writer - his word usage is exemplary. I loved reading his insights about various things, such as love: “Love is a form of childhood in the way we become capable again of being wholly enthralled, able to believe so much so easily so intensely.”

I enjoyed realizing that Martel’s fictional University is Trent, my alma matter, and Roetown is clearly Peterborough, my hometown. It came to me slowly and then, of course, I had to go to Wikipedia to confirm that he went to school there. Pretty cool to read references that align with your own experiences.

I was amazed at his ability to provide rather exacting descriptions of sex (some of which also aligned with my own experiences LOL) - female on female, female on male, male on male. Impressive, seriously. Likely offended all sorts of readers, but THAT’S LIFE!

I’d love to hear him talk about the book. It’s a fascinating work. Sad, but life is sad with times of intense joy & satisfaction.

I can only assume that part of the reason this book has such a low rating is the horrified fans of Life of Pi, who, confused by Ang Lee’s pretty movie, remember that story as a cute fairytale about a kid and a tiger in a boat and are still high on fairytale dust. Oh, shocker! Yann Martel writes about sex. Cover your eyes and hide away. He uses the word cock, too, in reference to something other than one of his beloved and frequently used animal metaphors. Nothing metaphorical about the cocks in this story.

Okay, seriously now. If you’re put off by graphic sex (not plenty, but a fair amount) and need an explanation for a man magically turning into a woman and subsequently acting as if nothing happened, you’re looking at the wrong book. I personally think it’s a great – and, sadly, rare - trait in a straight male author to successfully assume a female voice and write – oh, so vividly – about [random example] giving head to a dude or being sexually harassed by men. Try as I might, I couldn’t separate the author’s maleness from his story. I’m more impressed with Martel successfully impersonating a female character than I would have been with a woman doing it. Does this prove that I completely missed the point of the whole book? In fact, I’m not even sure what said point is. Is it, as suggested by Chapter 2, that we are who we are and gender shouldn’t matter too much in how we perceive a human being? Is it that gender is within ourselves and biological sex shouldn’t define us? Does it have to do with social perception and how different an experience life is for a woman compared to a man? Or maybe there’s some underlying religious message that I fail to notice, but I wouldn’t be surprised of its existence, religion being, apparently, a subject of great interest to Martel (life sucks and god is a nice escape perhaps?).

Throughout the story, the narrator (whom, for convenience, I will call “Self”) is blurring the lines between male and female. On Self’s personal level of perception, the distinction is irrelevant. He doesn’t suffer important interior alterations when he changes sex and his transition into the role of female is smooth and almost imperceptible. For Self, this is a non-event and Martel treats it accordingly. It only comes as a shock to an outside audience, namely readers who can’t understand how a huge twist like this can be brushed over so lightly (with a simple change of passport, to be precise).

Naturally, the sex change brings with it a change in peoples’ attitude towards Self. A particularly relevant example is when Self (now a woman) and her travel companion, Ruth, face the constant harassment of Turkish men. The unwanted attention of men is, I’m sure, a reality all women are familiar with. In one of the most exquisite parts of the book, Martel writes about an unfamiliar feeling with surprising familiarity, choosing his words perfectly, from how he introduces the subject all the way to its conclusion.

“When I look back now, some of these hassles were unacceptable. They had one common link: men. Men who openly stared up and down at us. Men who cracked smiles at the sight of us and turned to their friends, pointing us out with a nod of the head. Men who brushed themselves against us to pass us in streets that were not busy. Men who brushed themselves against us to pass us in streets that were not busy and who ran their hands over our breasts. The young man who ran up to me from behind in a dark street of Ankara, pinched my ass and vanished just as quickly. The one in Istanbul, too. Men who clicked at us. Boys who clicked at us. Men who felt they had the right to ooze their unctuous, unwanted attentions upon us regardless of our words, opinions or indifference. Men who decided they knew what we wanted, what destination, what product, what service, what price, before we had even opened our mouths. The bus driver who, seeing that I was asleep on the last row of seats, stopped his bus on the side of the highway, came back and kissed me, so that I woke up to this stranger looming over me and pushed him away angrily, calling out to Ruth, while he walked back smiling and laughing, proud of himself. The man who exposed himself to me at a roadside stop, grinning and playing with himself. […] It wore us down. More than we realized. Some doors became very important to us in Turkey: the doors to our hotel rooms. When we closed and locked them, it was not to secure Ruth’s camera, but to secure our shelter. Shelter meant a place to be together - and away.[…]
Which is not to say that we didn’t meet Turkish men who were nice. We did. Lots. Who were nice; proper; civil; friendly. But this approach - some good Turks, some bad Turks - is all wrong. My point is neither demographic nor democratic because it was not primarily individuals that struck me, so much as an attitude. And an attitude can slosh around like the sea, rising in one man, ebbing in another, surging forth anew in a third — all beyond the accounting of numbers.”

Aside from Martel making an excellent woman, there’s a lot else to love about this book. I enjoyed a great deal Self’s childhood memories that account for charming sentences such as “My time as a rabbit was closely related to that strange condition called sleep.” or “At the time I thought the sun and the moon were opposite elements, negations of each other. The moon was the sun turned off, like a light-bulb, the moon was the sun sleeping, the dimples on its surface the pores of a great eyelid”.

Significantly different from Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil, Self bears a small resemblance to them both in the common theme of animal violence vs human cruelty, which is, however, not dwelled upon as much. Self’s endearing habit of comparing objects to animals (“I treated the vacuum cleaner - a distant cousin of the elephant - and the washing machine - a relative of the raccoon - with the greatest respect.”; the TV is an animal too, but selfish and uncaring) makes way to cruelty as he grows up: he cuts a worm and a snail in half, buries fish, sets a hedgerow on fire. Horrible images, but don’t get too caught up in these diversions and miss the bigger picture: humans inflicting pain on one another. Just so you know what to expect, I’ll quote a passage about animal cruelty:

“I burned ants with a magnifying glass. I starved two small turtles to death. I asphyxiated lizards in jars. I exploded spiders with firecrackers. I poured salt on slugs. I attempted to drown frogs and, when they would not drown, I threw them against the wall of a boathouse and watched them float upside down in the water. I killed a huge toad by throwing broken roof tiles at it. I committed these atrocities in solitude, without glee, deliberately. Each cruelty, each final spasm of life, resonated in me like a drop of water falling in a silent cave.”

Another tie to his other books (and that’s where the similarities stop) is that Martel has this weird habit of making things awkward by bringing up religion and capital-c Christ at inappropriate times. It’s like hanging out with a bunch of people, having a great time, and, out of the blue, someone drops some religious comment that goes beyond the usual “oh my god” followed by uncomfortable silence, everyone avoiding eye contact and showing a sudden interest in the closest bottle cap.

Self is not perfect. The story tends to slide into banality when Self starts dating, but that’s a momentary lapse and, overall, it’s a masterfully written novel that includes quite a few autobiographical elements and explores gender and sexual identity in an unconventional way.

………………………

A few quotes:

"On the way home she gave me the First facts of my sexual persona. Things were far more limited than my open mind had imagined. There were in fact only two sexes, not infinite numbers. And those little bums and little fingers that I had seen in the various I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours exercises I had conducted were the complementary sexual organs in question, all two of them, one little bum for one little finger. I was amazed. This question of complementarity referred merely to a vulgar point of biology, an anatomical whim? The menu for ocular fish had only two items on it? And it was decided in advance which they could select, either little bum or little finger, steak or chicken? What kind of a restaurant is that, Mother? I had indeed noticed only little bums and little fingers so far, but I thought this was simply a reflection of the small size of my sample. (In a similar vein, though most of my coevals at Jiminy Cricket were white, on the basis of the skin colour of a few of them, reinforced by things I had seen on television and in magazines, I was quite confident that there existed people who were black, brown, yellow, red, blue, orange, perhaps even striped.) But no, there were only two, my mother insisted. Even more astonishing, she said that little bums were to be found exclusively in girls and little fingers exclusively in boys. Girls, by definition, were females with little bums who could only be wives. Boys, by definition, were males with little fingers who could only be husbands. I should remember these permutations for there were no others. No, husbands could not be girls. No, a wife could not marry another wife. No, no, no."

"I sought guidance where I could. At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine - and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When I walked the corridors of Parliament Hill, passing the portraits of my future predecessors, I would say to myself, “C’est le parlement, masculine. Power, it’s le pouvoir.” I would return home to la maison, feminine where, as likely as not, I would go to my room, la chambre, where I would settle to read un livre masculine, until supper. During the masculine meal, feminine food would be eaten. After my hard, productive masculine day, I would rest during the feminine night.[…]
I would look up at the male yellow sun and the male blue sky. I would turn and smell and feel the female green grass. Then I would roll over and over and over down the incline till I was dizzy, mixing up the colours and the genders. I felt neither masculinity nor femininity, I only felt desire, I only felt humid with life."

"Travelling is like an acceleration: it’s hard to stop, you don’t want to stop. Change becomes a habit and habits are hard to change."

"This is as close as I can come to an explanation of why I started to write: not for the sake of writing, but for the sake of company."

"…if you asked me for the one destination of which I could say, “Go there and you will have travelled,” if you wanted to know where El Dorado was, I would say it was that place ubiquitous among travellers: the middle of nowhere."

Weird and difficult at times. Addresses issues of gender and self (see title). Certainly not for everyone but if you are willing to read something weird and different and kinda good but not great...