Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Martel, Yann - Julian Ferraro (review date 22 November 1996)

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Julian Ferraro (review date 22 November 1996)

SOURCE: Ferraro, Julian. “Male-Female Experiences.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4886 (22 November 1996): 24.

[In the following review, Ferraro observes that the narration in Self rejects conventional notions of plot and character to focus on experience, judging the narrative voice in the book as often strained, pretentious, and dull.]

Self is the fictional autobiography of a young Canadian writer, from the first remembered experience to the age of thirty. In the course of the novel, the self of the title undergoes two changes of sex, from male to female and back again, has various relationships, suffers loss and terrible brutalization, writes, and does a fair amount of travelling. The story unfolds chronologically but in a random, accumulative manner, the absence of structure emphasized by the stagey imbalance between the book's first “chapter” of 329 pages and its...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Cary Fagan (review date April 1993)
   2. Merna Summers (review date June 1993)
   3. A. C. (review date 27 May 1994)
   4. Greg Hollingshead (review date April 1996)
   5. Christine Hamelin (review date November 1996)
   6. Julian Ferraro (review date 22 November 1996)
   7. Nathan Whitlock (review date August 2001)
   8. Francis King (review date 18 May 2002)
   9. Francie Lin (review date 16 June 2002)
   10. Roz Kaveney (review date 19 July 2002)
   11. William Skidelsky (review date 29 July 2002)
   12. Charlotte Innes (review date 19 August 2002)
   13. Yann Martel and Sabine Sielke (interview date 2002)
   14. Gordon Houser (review date 8 February 2003)
   15. Pankaj Mishra (review date 27 March 2003)
   16. Elizabeth Palmberg (review date March-April 2003)
   17. Gerald T. Cobb (review date 14 April 2003)
   18. Randy Boyagoda (review date May 2003)
   19. Jean Smith (review date spring 2003)
   20. Linda M. Morra (review date summer 2003)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Yann Martel