Self is Yann Martel's debut novel, and is described as a 'fictionalised autobiography'.

In it, Martel paints a picture of his life as he felt it, and as such some of the details of the narrative are not in line with what we might consider as essentially 'possible'.

For instance, at one point within the novel, when Martel is attending university, he refers to the fact that he wakes up one morning as a woman. Not merely identifying as a woman, but physically inhabiting a woman's body, and even experiencing menstruation. This seemingly impossible transformation is a beautiful example of Martel's fluid and accepting approach to life. The entire novel is concerned with feeling and personal experience, rather than being tied to empirical fact and exactitude.

A stunning narrative cataloguing one person's journey through life, love, and learning, Self is an essential read for anyone searching for their identity, and for anyone that takes pleasure in narrative as a true art form.

I usually love Yann Martel books--they are quirky, intellectual, & mysterious. This one was all those things, but I was very confused for a good portion of it as I was under the mistaken impression, perhaps because of the title, that this was a type of autobiography of the author. When suddenly, on his 18th birthday, the main character wakes up as a woman & proceeds to live life as a female, I was surprised. Once I figured out it was a novel & not his real life story, I could then appreciate the book for itself. I did enjoy it. I feel the author had a believable & relatable understanding in presenting the character's life as both a male & female, especially in describing the rape scene & the sense of violation. I could identify with many of the experiences & recognize my own thoughts & feelings in the character. It turns out to be a heartbreaking story. I think it was well done & I enjoyed it.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve read Life of Pi, but from what I remember, this novel is completely different. Self is self-consciously postmodern, and seems almost like a series of experiments in writing that were thrown together into a novel. There is some absolutely beautiful descriptive language – such as the recurring metaphor of love as fish swimming in our eyes – and these passages are much more enjoyable than the novel as a whole. I re-read certain sections, savouring the words, but overall the story fell flat for me.
The issue of gender is obviously an important one in Self. Martel is able to convincingly get inside the child’s mind, and the narrator’s early sexual confusion – he thinks that each person has their own gender, and we are made to fit with only one other, whether boy or girl – reminds us that gender doesn’t matter to children. However, I found it problematic that he does not differentiate between physical sex and one’s identifying gender. The narrator physically changes into a woman, but his/her world view was still very masculine in my opinion, so much so that I kept forgetting about the gender change completely.
The change in gender seemed like an unnecessary construct within the novel; the plot could have stood alone with it. Alternatively, much more could have been done with the change. I do think the way it was handled – no one seems all that shocked that this young boy is now a woman – was ahead of its time. Self was first published almost twenty years ago, and issues of gender and identification are much more accepted now than they were then. As the narrator tells us, “Gender in matters of love struck me as of no greater consequence than flavours in ice cream.” (p. 60)
Parts of the novel read almost like a writing journal, where Martel is using the narrator to explore his own unusable story ideas. Fortunately, I found some of these ideas quite enjoyable to read on their own. Overall, the language and ideas were strong enough to save this novel from its other weaknesses of plot and character.

I've had this book on my shelf for quite a few years now, every so often I would attempt to read it and could never get further than the first page or two as it goes into descriptive detail about feces. It was hardly a page and a half about the subject, but for lack of interest I would always put the book down mid-sentence and back on the shelf. Last summer I bought Life of Pi and fell in love with it, so I decided to give Yann Martel another try and just recently forced myself to read this book.

It was not always easy, and it was not always interesting, but I loved reading Self. It was not so much the storyline that chipped away at me, but the emotions I felt when reading it. It is a fictional-autobiography, detailing the life of the narrator from birth until young-adulthood, and nothing major really happens besides the transformation from male to female and back again. The story itself is really only so-so, but what I got from it - how it made me reflect on a subject that I previously had little knowledge and understanding about, is the reason I will forever cherish this book.

It happens so nonchalantly, the first time the narrator suddenly changes gender overnight in Portugal. It took me a while to accept the fact that this character is actually female, no longer male and I eventually stopped asking the repetitive questions in my head that went something like this: "How is this possible? Has no one noticed you resemble a male? Where is the blood coming from? When/How did you suddenly get breasts? What do you mean by lesbian? Do these boys/men not realize you have a penis? Did you actually have a sex change? Or is it all just metaphorical and these boys/men are actually gay? Am I missing something?"

I went from confused to just simply accepting and all of a sudden the character was entirely female, and always had been. The details of the transformation were so vague at first, the character was not bothered by it but was very accepting and willing - as if she'd known of her fate all along. When she eventually changed back to male I was heartbroken. I wanted so badly for her to switch back again into her true form so she could be with the love of her life.

What I got out of this book will forever stay with me. Although I've always been accepting of the gay and lesbian community, the idea of a transgendered individual had always been strange and foreign and made me feel uneasy. The idea of loving the same sex was fathomable, but the desire to become the opposite was not so. An important lesson that Self reinforced in me is not to judge a book by its cover, that you cannot possibly define someones identity by what is underneath their clothes. Everyone deserves the chance to be themselves - even if it means changing genders.

Yann Martel knows how to dig deep into my soul. His novels are beautifully written, full of emotion that makes you feel compassion for the characters he created. Once I got past the dreaded fecal matter on the first page I couldn't put the book down. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for something more than just a "good read".

Wow. I picked this up bc I loved Life of Pi. It was totally different but equally unique and well-written. It wan't a "can't put it down" read, but it was emotionally packed and will remain with me, I'm sure. It would be an interesting bookclub read - much to discuss and think about!

2012: I loved it.

2018: A few quotes were circling through my brain as I read this book. Foremost was Whitman's "I contain multitudes" and second was Adler's "although it is not possible to write a wholly true autobiography, neither is it possible to write one that contains no truth at all." Is this autobiography strictly rational? Not at all. Can we still learn about its author through it? Absolutely. With those two sentiments in mind, which speak to very similar phenomena concerning humans and their autobiographies, I believe we can safely approach Self.

Self, by nature and by title, is a tough nut to crack. To many, the book seems contradictory (let us remember which two lines precede Whitman's "multitudes"), overly-confusing, and entirely too fantastical for an autobiography. Why does something start off so seemingly normal, and then change so abruptly to something approaching magical realism? What does the author hope to gain with this addition? As the back of my edition says, the author is trying to explore the meeting-points between fiction and autobiography, between man and woman, and between violence and happiness – related subjects all. A rather contentious fare for us as readers, given the common political charges of the day, bound as we all are to our (purportedly) fixed, immutable, and critical IDENTITIES. Flying in the face of current narratives, whether racial, gender-based, or sexual, Self attempts to transcend the categorical in search of the universal. In spite of modern assertions that different categories of humans are fundamentally incapable of understanding one another (one of the most pernicious memes of our time), Self hints at our fundamental mutual-intelligibility – that, with reason, compassion, and practice, we can come to understand one another, even if our sufferings and hardships take different forms. This will, of course, be antithetical to many people these days, but it is a foundational belief of mine that has yet to be shaken. I am happy that this book exists, if only for this message.

Also central to the work is the concept of transformation, or change: "Indeed, from my earliest years the idea of transformation has been central to my life. Naturally so, I suppose, being the child of diplomats. I changed schools, languages, countries and continents a number of times during my childhood. At each change I had the opportunity to re-create myself, to present a new façade, to bury past errors and misrepresentations." We have all noticed this, I'm sure. We return to an old friend group to find that their perception of us is stale and calcified; we have changed, so why are we still looked at as we were before? Perception is a constant process of updating, where people are concerned, and that is one aspect that this book covers thoughtfully. Another is self-perception. The self in Self is at the heart of several existential thoughts and threats, and we are carried along from boyhood to womanhood to manhood, which becomes increasingly interesting as the internal and external worlds do not correspond perfectly. Flux and ephemerality are also at the heart of this book, which makes sense, as the self is not immutable: we may have fundamental qualities, but they can change, even if it is only by scant degrees over the years. This phenomenon is made explicit by the author; while our biological sex does not change in a day, still our perceptions can and do. Martel is highlighting this strange occurrence and attempting to bring it to the fore. Outside change engenders shifts in perception, but the inside, unseen, change is the more common – and oftentimes the most powerful.

One of my favorite aspects of the book is its shifting, achronological flowing of events. One minute we are in the standard timeline, and then a thought connects tangentially to another, and we are years away from our original locus in time. One thought gives way to another, sometimes related, sometimes not, and we are swept away in the deluge of mind. This writing format captures the true spirit of the mind brilliantly. It's not always sensible, but neither is the mind. In creating and remembering the self, we are often subject to this achronological phenomenon: we realize a quality in ourselves, and we begin to search for why we are that way; we remember something that might account for it, and attach causal significance to it. (Why am I so skeptical of authority? Ah, I remember that time when I was twelve, and the floor came out from underneath me during Confirmation! It must have been . . . !) This causality is not always factual (oftentimes it is not), but its nature as a post hoc rationalization gives us some comfort in the creation of our narrative. Just as we don't like reading messy, chaotic, meaninglessly-constructed stories, so too do we fear leading such lives; we want our actions to make sense in light of our pasts, and we want to justify our behavior given what we know of ourselves. These justifications, by nature, though, require us to delve into past and present fluidly, not knowing where we are, but somehow dragging meaning from the mess. Our eyes are clouded and the route hazy. Self leads us to this vista and forces us to look.

I could not help but dislike this book. It was like Yann Martel was trying to be as edgy as possible and because of this the book lacked reality. I'm actually surprised this was published

AKA: Metamorphosis

Self, Yann Martel’s first novel, explores the themes of gender, sexuality and identity. The unnamed narrator tells about his life as a child. The strong focus on sexuality and masturbation remind me of Ian McEwan The Cement Garden. Only Martel takes it much further. About one-third of the way through the book the narrator slowly transforms into a female. The whole nature of the book makes you question: you question what you are reading (fiction, non-fiction), you question who the narrator is and what the narrator is (male/female, gay/straight, gay man or straight woman, gay woman or straight man? Is the book on some levels autobiographical? I read an interview Martel gave where he stated that he does not write autobiographical fiction. There is a violent scene near the end of the book that many will want to avoid. But the book on the whole is well worth the read.

Probably the most provocative book I've read. Wiggled into my dreams! Didn't love or hate it.

eponymous sentence:
p17: So it is that I have no memories of mirrors, no memories of clothes, of skin, of limbs, of body, of my own physical self as a child.

cement:
p147: We climbed the cement steps.

p163: Roger's peach clapboard house was tucked away between two larger houses that were closer to the street, down a cracked cement path, behind a massive bush.

That took quite a turn--definitely will trump that ending.

I'm still not sure what the object was, but it sure was thought-provoking.

I read this a long time ago, before Martel was famous and I enjoyed it. It's a difficult read in the sense that time and point of view are very flexible, not to mention that the plot is a bit cloudy.

For a brief time, towards the end of the novel, I was actively enjoying reading it. A bit before that, it was at least tolerable. But with the late game-changing plot-twist, the book lost me.

The novel is about the life of a person who is biologically born (and identifies)as a (cis) man. Then, when he wakes up on his 18th birthday, he discovers he has turned into a biological/cis female, and begins identifying as such.

There is no surprise, no change of psyche. She just goes "oh huh I'm a girl now. Ok." Later, when she re-encounters her aunt, who knew her as a man, the aunt isn't surprised or reacts either.

We never learn this person's name, except an offhand mention that it is androgynous and can work for a man or a woman.

Before the sex change, we're lead through his childhood and early experiences. This includes his growth through puberty and frequent masturbation. Which I found very tiring to read about.

The first part of the novel does do some work on gender/gender roles/the differences between the genders/sexes (the novel considers them to be pretty much the same thing). These themes are discarded after the sex change.

Rather, it beings to follow the woman's relationships through her time at university, getting her BA, and life afterward.

At one part, when she's 21, she encounters a forty something woman traveling alone in Greece. They hit it off, and soon become lovers.

There is an interesting section while they travel through Turkey, and the narrator describes living under the male gaze/being subjected to sexual harassment due to men who through they were entitled to her body.

Despite being/identifying as a woman at this point, the text never refers to her relationship with the other woman as a lesbian one.

On the other hand, when she begins to have sex with men, she thinks of it as a homosexual/gay relationship, even though on the surface and as far as her partner's know, it's a cis/heterosexual relationship.

My favourite section of the book is when the unnamed narrator is living with Tito, the first and only person she loves. I enjoyed hearing about their happiness, loving each other, and how he buys her a hideously ugly bulldog for Christmas.

However, this is interrupted when Tito is away on the trip. While going to her office (a sparsely furnished apartment where she writes, as the narrator is a mostly unsuccessful author), she lets in a strange man who says he wants to see what it looks like inside.

He beats and rapes her.

Afterward, she returns to the apartment she shared with Tito and their dog. She has a breakdown (understandably -- and partially because she thought she was pregnant with Tito's child), and then turns back into a biological/cis man.

The narrator, now a he again, flees with the west, leaving his life (and Tito) behind, without explaining to Tito why. Earlier, the text established that Tito is straight and not attracted to men, so presumably their relationship wouldn't have survived the second sex change.

Emotionally and psychologically shattered, he loses track of time and events while traveling through the prairies. For some time, his only sexual encounters are meeting with other men in the park, and having cheap hookups (which, he mentions his rapist left him with herpes type b, and so I can't help but wonder if he spread this to his subsequent partners).

At one point, he meets a woman and begins a relationship with her. He thinks of himself as a "tepid lesbian," but they stay together. He abandons the novel he was working on before the rape, and I don't think he resumes writing.

The novel ends soon after, with the character introducing themself in gender neutral terms by their blood type, that they speak French and English, their eyes are x colour and their hair is x colour, and as a Canadian.

I didn't like the book because it was too senseless. The sex change was inane and unexplained, and the novel itself doesn't do any meaningful work on gender/sex or sexuality. So I don't really understand what the point if it was.