I can only assume that part of the reason this book has such a low rating is the outraged fans of Life of Pi, who, probably 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, let’s get serious 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 was 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, but don’t get too caught up in these diversions and miss the bigger picture: humans inflicting pain on one another. Just ‘cause I feel a little evil, I’ll quote a passage about burning ants & other similar imagery:“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.”Kids are awful creatures. Although, I confess, I’m quite intrigued by the possibility of exploding spiders with firecrackers. Seems like a fun cure for arachnophobia and I’ve got no mercy for those bastards, anyway. 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, when, out of the blue, someone drops some religious comment that goes beyond the usual “OMG” and there’s an uncomfortable silence, with everyone avoiding eye contact and showing a sudden interest in the closest napkin or bottle cap, until one guy finally mumbles something akin to “well, I’ll just go get another round of beers then” and, with a relieved sigh, hurries off not to be seen again for the next half hour. I hate when that happens.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 semi-autobiography (yes, it is!) that explores gender and sexual identity in an unconventional way.………………………Some nice 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."[young Self vs. middle-aged Ruth]"Typically, this is the way things went. Imagine this play:DRAMATIS PERSONAE:YOUTHAGEFUNNY-LOOKING CLOUDSCENE: a hot, sunny beach in the south-western Peloponnese(The curtain rises. Youth and Age are lying on the beach, facing the sea andthe sun.)YOUTH: (rattles on at a hundred miles an hour while Age listens.)(Funny-looking Cloud enters stage right)AGE (pointing): Isn’t that a funny-looking cloud?YOUTH (looks, smiles): Yes, it is.(They both look at the Funny-looking Cloud until it floats off stage left. A longpause.)YOUTH: (rattles on at a hundred miles an hour while Age listens.)CURTAIN""…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."
I just don't think I understood this book. It was written like a diary but there were (almost) no chapters or dates. One of the comments on the back of my copy of the book says the novel is a meditation on identity but I only really noticed one aspects of identity and that was an exploration on sexuality. So I didn't really notice to much exploration into the character's identity. One of the issues I have about this novel is that it's about a writer trying to write a novel. I think this is a theme with Martel because I know at the start of Life of Pi one character is looking for inspiration for a story and if I remember correctly Beatrice and Virgil a character in that novel was also a struggling writer. So I find it annoying there is this consistent theme through is books. Self is even more annoying because there are so many "unwritten" stories of the main characterThere is a section on page 272 and 273 that describes this novel well, "I finished my novel. It was a bad novel...I would return to (the novel); then salvage parts and incorporate then into my next novel." So I think Martel had so many little ideas that he wanted to turn into novels but could never fully complete them. He put them all into this novel and made a significant part of Self about all these little story ideas. My favourite line of the whole book was from page 231 which reads " ...love, like any living thing, settles where is feels it has a futureAlso I don't even know if the character's name is mentioned.I still don't get this book
What do You think about Self (2003)?
It's almost unbelievable that this and Life of Pi were written by the same author.The tone of Self is so absurdly different from Pi's. It offers no conclusion to speak of, nor explanation, it is ragingly atheist almost to the point of being nihilistic. And yet it is just as enlightening.That is to say, it's a much more difficult read. Self holds your hand less than the grand majority of books, offers no guidance as to what you are supposed to grasp from it, yet it offers so much to the philosophical reader.Martel writes at top form here ( though I expected no less ), with the book feeling more like a conversation than a grand Author talking down at you. The content is much more difficult though, with parts so personal reading them feels like intruding, and a final act difficult to read even for my jaded self.All in all I recommend tremendously ( five stars ) but only to those who can stomach it ( and this is where it loses a star. ).
—Sebastien Swift
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'.(view spoiler)[ 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. (hide spoiler)]
—Charley
I'd read 'Life of Pi' a few years ago, so when this book came to me as a birthday gift I was excited to read another book by Yann Martel. It took me a few pages to get used to the writing style presented here - a mix of flashbacks and future shots and short bits that didn't make much sense at the moment. After the first 20 pages or so, I could barely put it down and fell in love with the style. A great book, though some of the events are a bit mystifying and other ones downright tragic and heart-wrenching. I plan to re-read it as I feel I've missed some things that turned out to be important later.
—Kim
