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 second of forty-three words. Just as the central events of the story—the alternations of the...