![]() First edition | |
Author | Yann Martel |
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Cover artist | Keith Ng (photo), Jonathan Howells (design) |
Country | Canada |
Language | English |
Publisher | Knopf Canada |
Publication date | April 1996 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
Pages | 331 pp |
ISBN | 0-394-28160-8 |
OCLC | 35366650 |
Preceded by | The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios |
Followed by | Life of Pi |
Self is a novel by Yann Martel. It tells the story of a traveling writer who wakes up one morning to discover that he has become a woman. It was first published by Knopf Canada in 1996.
The narrator, at first male, explains various events from his early childhood, living with a traveling family who finally settle in Ottawa, Ontario. He goes on to explain events from his years in private school (including his parents' death), until he graduates and travels to Portugal, where he, on his eighteenth birthday, wakes up as a female.
Surprisingly unfazed by her transformation, the narrator concludes her trip and begins university back in the fictional Roetown. She begins writing, and keeps travel in her life, eventually visiting such places as Spain and Thailand, to name a few. She shares romances with a select few — males and females alike. Eventually she gets published, and after graduating, moves to Montreal, where she gets a job as a waitress while continuing to write. At her job she meets Tito, her final love. But as the novel is nearing a conclusion, she is suddenly raped by a vicious neighbour in her secluded apartment and her body reverts to being a male again.
Martel described Self as the crucible of a thematic interest in religious faith that later informed his second work, Life of Pi. [1] Martel also reported in interviews that in writing the book's rape scene he contemplated the relationship between religion and evil: "It made me think about how people live with evil. What interested me in religion is its claim to go beyond the bounds of human existence." [2] Some reviewers noted an autobiographical strand in the book, [3] whose hero is, like Martel, the child of Canadian diplomats and a writer achieving recognition at a young age. [4] It is set partly in Peterborough, Ontario, where Martel was a student at Trent University. [5]
Self was Martel's first novel, and followed the publication in 1993 of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, his first collection of short stories. The novel, in Martel's own words, initially "vanished quickly and quietly", [6] though it was shortlisted for the 21st Chapters/Books In Canada First Novel Award, then Canada's most valuable first-novel award with a prize of 5,000 Canadian dollars. [7]
More critical attention fell upon the book when Martel's second novel, Life of Pi , won the 2002 Man Booker Prize. [8] A reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, noting that Martel himself had called the novel "terrible" and expressed a wish that it "disappear", agreed that the work suffered from a "serious crisis of identity", and lacked the power of Life of Pi. [8] The Montreal Mirror went further, calling Self "lame... A pastiche of autobiography and post-modern plot twists, it was haunted by an off-putting tone of smug precociousness." [9] The Toronto Star reviewer objected to Self's protagonist's "self-satisfied air", but praised the work for its deft touch and compelling narrative. [10] A writer in The Independent described the book's handling of gender change as "crude confusion", [11] while The Hindu described the book as "interesting ideas juxtaposed against not-so-inspiring writing". [12]
Martel received in 1991 a grant of $18,000 from the Canada Council to write Self, [13] which was published in Canada in 1996, with a British launch the same November. [14]
The Giller Prize is a literary award given to a Canadian author of a novel or short story collection published in English the previous year, after an annual juried competition between publishers who submit entries. The prize was established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife Doris Giller, a former literary editor at the Toronto Star, and is awarded in November of each year along with a cash reward with the winner being presented by the previous year's winning author.
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Canadian playwright, author, actress, and broadcast host who lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Events from the year 2002 in Canada.
Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, India, who explores issues of spirituality and metaphysics from an early age. After a shipwreck, he survives 227 days while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger, raising questions about the nature of reality and how it is perceived and told.
Gail Kathryn Anderson-Dargatz is a Canadian novelist.
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The Governor General's Award for English-language fiction is a Canadian literary award that annually recognizes one Canadian writer for a fiction book written in English. It is one of fourteen Governor General's Awards for Literary Merit, seven each for creators of English- and French-language books. The awards was created by the Canadian Authors Association in partnership with Lord Tweedsmuir in 1936. In 1959, the award became part of the Governor General's Awards program at the Canada Council for the Arts in 1959. The age requirement is 18 and up.
This is a list of recipients and nominees of the Governor General's Awards award for English-language poetry. The award was created in 1981 when the Governor General's Award for English language poetry or drama was divided.
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and Other Stories is a book of short stories by Canadian author Yann Martel. First published as a paperback by Knopf Canada in the spring of 1993, it received little attention outside Canada until 2004, after Martel's award-winning Life of Pi gained worldwide popularity and people became interested in the author's work.
Clara Callan is a novel by Canadian writer Richard B. Wright, published in 2001. It is the story of a woman in her thirties living in Ontario during the 1930s and is written in epistolary form, utilizing letters and journal entries to tell the story. The protagonist, Clara, faces the struggles of being a single woman in a rural community in the early 20th century. The novel won the Governor General's Award in the English fiction category, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Trillium Book Award.
Louise Penny is a Canadian author of mystery novels set in the Canadian province of Quebec centred on the work of francophone Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. Penny's first career was as a radio broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). After she turned to writing, she won numerous awards for her work, including the Agatha Award for best mystery novel of the year five times, including four consecutive years (2007–2010), and the Anthony Award for best novel of the year five times, including four consecutive years (2010–2013). Her novels have been published in 23 languages.
Nancy Lee is a Welsh-born Canadian short story writer and novelist.
Joan Thomas is a Canadian novelist and book reviewer from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Tomislav Torjanac is a Croatian illustrator, who works mostly in oil paints combined with a digital medium. His creative process is very physical in the paint handling and is characterized by rich impastos.
Yann Martel, is a Canadian author who wrote the Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. Life of Pi was adapted for a movie directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
Shaena Lambert is a Canadian novelist and short story writer.
Beatrice and Virgil is Canadian writer Yann Martel's third novel. First published in April 2010, it contains an allegorical tale about representations of the Holocaust. It tells the story of Henry, a novelist, who receives the manuscript of a play in a letter from a reader. Intrigued, Henry traces the letter to a taxidermist, who introduces him to the play's protagonists, two taxidermy animals—Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a monkey.
Carole Corbeil (1952–2000) was a Canadian arts critic and novelist. Born in Montreal to Québécois parents, her writing was often informed by the cultural displacement, and the subsequent sense of dual belonging, that she experienced when her parents divorced and her mother remarried to an anglophone man.
Émile Martel was a Canadian diplomat and writer who won the Governor General's Award for French-language poetry in 1995 for his poetry collection Pour orchestre et poète seul.
Emma Richler is a British/Canadian writer.