Self by Yann Martel is in many ways a delightful book about identity, but much of the exploration is sexual so it will not be to everyone's taste. It also has one extremely brutal, harrowing event in it which may put others off. If you can cope with those provisos then go away and acquire the book, read it and admire, but don't read on here as this is almost impossible to review without littering the post with spoilers. If you have read it then I would be delighted to know what you think.
The reason it is so hard not to include spoilers is that so little of factual note happens and it is impossible to talk about the book sensibly without addressing the key events relating to the main character's identity. Essentially a bildungsroman, we start with the character narrator's earliest memories, move on through childhood, schools, friends, developing sexuality, and emerging academic interests. Much of this parallels the biography of the Spanish, Canadian, and somewhat nomadic author Martel and is rather semi-autobiographical. Much of it also deals with language, and language and identity; fitting obviously when much of the book is set in Canada. A key moment showing the difficulties and joys of both sexual and linguistic identities is the narrator's childhood crush on a little girl, aged 8 as he is, who is a fellow guest at friends of his parents:
She gave off sunshine. She had thick, crinkly blonde hair, skin that was honey coloured, very dark eyes and a face so clear and open that years later, when Tito and I were hiking in the Himalayas and there was a change of wind and suddenly, in an explosion of clarity that cut my breath short, we beheld the mountain Nanga Parbat in its massive, microscopically accurate entirety, the first world, the only word, that came to my lips was her long forgotten name.
The little girl, Marissa, is Czech so they cannot communicate properly. She speaks German. He doesn't but compromises by using his least proficient language, Spanish, as it "was the most foreign to me and therefore, surely, the closest to Czech". This linguistic confusion is presented in two columns: on the left are alternate German and Spanish phrases, each the disjointed ramblings of 8 year olds trying to make conversation with someone they cannot understand. On the right is a column of English translation. This is a clever physical device, and perfectly captures the amusing nature of wistful childhood reminiscence; it reminded me of Nicola Barker's clever use of script to show non-English speech. Back to the children: put to bed together because of lack of space they have an innocent kiss and cuddle.
I awoke in the morning with the conviction that love is an insomnia that wakes us from the sleep of life. I had been asleep before but never again.
Moving into his adolescence his sexual development continues but rather less innocently in thought and deed, till after a family tragedy in his last year of school he goes travelling. Then without warning the little boy we have followed to manhood wakes up as a woman. This Kafkaesque moment is treated as mundane and narrator just ploughs on and despite a deeply analytical mind there is no introspection about this marked change.
It was over the course of a night that things came to completion, I awoke suddenly. I don't know what I was dreaming, why I should have awakened. I sat up. I was confused. I couldn't remember anything - my name, my age, where I was - complete amnesia. I knew that I was thinking in English, that much I knew right away. My identity was tied to the English language. And I knew that I was a woman, that also. English speaking and a woman. That was the core of my being. The rest, the ornaments of identity, came several seconds later, after some mental groping. What I remember most clearly of this confusion is the feeling that came upon me afterwards, the feeling that everything was alright.
Now, oddly, the above is entirely preceded on the left of the page with the text paralleled in French but with the slight change: "Mon identité était lilée à langue français". Putting the French on the left, where a westerner looks first when reading, of course wrong foots the English speaker nearly as much as the actual assertions in the text.
The whole physical 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?), you question the meanings in the text and try to tangle with languages you may not know (are translations simply that or are there differences in meaning?), and you are very unlikely to have access to all the languages used (Spanish, French, German and Hungarian). The Hungarian is the most interesting as the narrator says: "It tricks you with the Roman alphabet and the dress and deportment of its speakers, but then it erupts - and you might as well be in China. Not a single morpheme will trouble your comprehension." I have scanned a page which should hopefully open large enough to read in another window, and despite snippets of other European languages in your possession, or even fluencies in other languages I am sure, unless you are a bone fide Hungarian speaker you will not recognise a thing. Interestingly not even the proper nouns that appear in the English appear in the Hungarian so it seems likely that whatever the Hungarian text says, it is different from the English along side it. 
So we miss out on part of the text; English speakers are deliberately shut out by the author, maybe giving us a sense of distance and alienation too.
The very concept of questions occupies much of the narrator's deliberations, more actually then the idea of waking up with a different gender does.
Questions are tango dancers in search of partners. My insight was that a question is a question only if it has an answer. By which I don't mean that this answer must be known, merely that it must be known to exist.
She goes on:
A question is a question only if there is something out side it, separtate, that can function as an answer. A pseudo-question, on the other hand, gobbles up all possible answers by becoming a bigger and bigger pseudo-question, until at last it has swallowed up the entire universe and there is nothing outside it that can act as an answer.
Which makes me, as ever, wonder about the nature of the text and the reader's and writer's roles. Are we, the readers, outside of the text and so part of a dance, a tango with the author? Are we part of the same dance, the same movement, the same music but still separate and seeing things from slightly different perspectives as we progress across the literary floor? Somethings, behind us or at the peripheral edges or our vision, we miss and only the author knows the answer. But shouldn't this work the other way too; shouldn't we see things from our perspective that are denied to the vision of the author?
In a way we are the provider of text. The final major event uses the parallel columns technique. In the left is the description of the brutal event and in the right the narrator's psychological reaction to it. What happens is so horrific that the reaction is often just line after line of dots; elipsis. Manna from heaven to a reader response theorist. The author, implied or real, cannot know what we make of this, cannot know even if we can bear to read the events, or if once we get the gist we skim read the facts on the left and focus on the feelings on the right. How graphically do we fill in the fact, or the feelings? Only the reader knows what is in their line of sight as they move across the dance floor. As a result of the brutality and the attack upon the self that happens here the narrator's identity undergoes another massive shift.
Are we to some extent the author's answer, in that the text without us would not properly exist? Self as a ballroom is no quaint tea-dance, and it certainly follows no association rules on manoeuvres, but a mental turn about the floor here is rewarding if you are prepared to go where your partner leads you, whatever, and wherever. All of the above is chapter 1; chapter 2 consists of three and half lines, and really rather sounds like a beginning, especially after the breakdown of self that occurs at the end of chapter 1. Where are you going to go with chapter 3? The book is not just harrowing, or explicit: it is often intriguing or delightful. Will you dance?
In my quest to find books that avoid the icky-sticky sentimentality rampant in the publishing world for the under 6s I was delighted that my 4 year old received this lovely book recently. Under the Sea by Anna Milbourne and Cathy Shimmen is both visually delightful and textually sensible. It is also non-fiction but even the most dedicated story-head won't notice as there is so much to talk about on each page. 
environments but with some historical and weather themes thrown in too. The text is always by Anna Milbourne but the illustrator seems to vary. I quite fancy In the Nest, or In the Castle though On the Seashore would be a good companion for this volume and On the Farm or Under the Ground would appeal to the tractor or train obsessive. 
Ripe pickings this week from the foyer of my child's nursery school where there are shelves of tempting books for borrowing. Normally in rather a rush, I fail to linger here but absent mindedly arriving on time (before time!) I began to read the nearest one, 
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