[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 second of forty-three words. Just as the central events of the story—the alternations of the sex of the narrator—thwart the reader's expectations of sexual identity and continuity, so the conventions of traditional “masculine” narrative development are challenged by a more circular, open-ended, “feminine” unfolding. The result is a novel which rejects plot and character and focuses instead on experience; on the interaction of an evolving individual consciousness with the random contingencies of existence.

Things begin unpromisingly enough, with the relation of an anecdote more like a textbook example of Freudian theories of infant sexuality than an individual experience, in which the narrator proudly produces “a magnificent log of excrement” for his mother—“Pleasure given, pleasure had, I sensed.” Indeed, the early sections are marked by an annoyingly knowing gloss on the events of childhood. Yann Martel goes to some lengths to paint a picture of the whimsical originality of his young Self as he encounters various aspects of experience for the first time, but too often the result is strained, pretentious and thoroughly unengaging: “when I discovered the washing of laundry. Staring down into the toss and turmoil of clothes being cleaned mechanically is the closest I have come to belonging to a church, and was my introduction to museums.” It is testament to Martel's qualities as a writer that the book recovers at all from such a beginning—even then it does so only fitfully.

A recurring element in the descriptions of the older Self's writing activities are outlines of ideas for novels, plays and short stories. The first of these is described in the following terms: “I had an idea and I had drawn an awkward but detailed sketch of the set and stage. In considering these two things, the wordy idea in my head and the plotless sketch, I felt impelled to write the thing out, to people that stage.” A similar process seems to have been at work in the creation of Self itself. At the heart of the book is an interesting idea well realized—the changes in sex, each one following a particularly traumatic event (the death of the teenage boy's parents in an air-crash and the vicious rape of the young woman). Surrounding this, however, is a mass of filler that is often simply dull. The abiding impression of Self is of a potentially excellent short story overwhelmed by a bloated meandering travelogue. The narrator's violent rape by a neighbour—the most powerful piece of writing in the book, in which one of Martel's characteristic stylistic devices, the bifurcation of the narrative into two columns running down the page, action matched by internal thought or sensation, is used to effect—becomes almost gratuitous, its focus blurred by tedious trivia.

Throughout the novel, Martel attempts to create situations in which experiences and relationships are revealed in a fresh light, thanks to the alternation of the sex of the narrator. The confusion of gender with graphic depictions of sexual activity; alternately lesbian, homosexual and heterosexual, creates a powerful impression of the contact with “otherness” implicit in all sexual encounters. The precocious and annoying infant does develop into a sympathetic and unusual adult. The plotless narrative does complement the directionlessness of most of the characters, but too often the combination results in writing that, while occasionally comic or “bittersweet” (the verdict of the dust-jacket), is too often simply boring. Yann Martel is a talented writer, as the collection of short stories, The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (1994) revealed. However, anyone expecting a fulfilment of the promise shown by the earlier book will be disappointed by Self.