Review of SELF by Yann Martel
Who are We? What the self is, I should dearly like to know, and I have been attempting to fathom that question for nearly 30 years now. Whether I am closer to resolving that conundrum now at 54 than when I was 24 is a tough question as the ground seems to keep shifting under me as I get older. Anyway, I remember sitting in a psychiatric hospital when I was 40 and having been drugged up to the eyeballs by my psychiatrist to relieve a deep depression into which I had fallen, it suddenly occurred to me that not alone was my self very fluid indeed but that I had become merely a psychopharmacological entity. Previously, I had a notion of a very substantial self, or indeed, a conviction more likely, that I was a very sound and rounded self. After that experience of hospitalisation, I was never again to be very sure as to who I really was. Hence, I picked up this novel by Ya nn Martell. Yann Martell in this novel is no more sure...