Reading a Yann Martel story is like eavesdropping on an intensely personal monologue. His narrators let you in, unabashedly, on their most intimate experiences: toilet training, sex, menstruation, the loss of a beloved friend, the visceral effect of a beautiful piece of art, the devastation of being raped. Fleshed out as they are with genuine details from his own life, it is difficult not to confuse them for autobiography.
But they aren't.
"A lot of writers cloak a core of autobiography in a shell of fiction, but I want to do the reverse," he explained during a recent interview at a Montreal bistro. "I appropriate facts from my life, so the mirror reflects autobiography, but the core is not."
The core is a fertile and ambitious imagination that speaks through a highly original voice, which emerged with the short story that won the 1991 Journey Prize in 1991. This was the title story in his first published collection, The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (Knopf Canada, 1993). It tells of the harrowing, degrading, heart-breaking disintegration of a young man who is dying of AIDS, juxtaposed to the tumultuous history of the twentieth century.
Martel has a deft touch that shuns over-writing, preferring nuance to elaborate descriptives. His most evocative passages are neatly turned, deceptively simple sentences that jump off the page. "I'm not going to talk about what AIDS does to a human body," he writes in "Helsinki". "Imagine it very bad-and then make it worse. Look up in the dictionary the word `flesh'-it's a healthy, pink word-and then look up the word `melt'." The simple convergence of those two words, "flesh" and "melt", gives one's imagination all it needs to conjure up the most gruesome of fates. Though the interaction between the narrator and victim is achingly poignant and personally rendered, Martel never actually observed a friend stricken with AIDS.
"A friend of my parents died of AIDS, so I experienced an AIDS death from a distance. What moved me was the suffering I witnessed of those close to someone with the disease and the effects it had on their lives."
Another especially vivid story from the collection is the intriguingly titled "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton". It concerns an incident that never happened in a city-Washington-Martel has never visited. He affirms, however, that he shares his narrator's ignorance of music. But that doesn't rob him of the ability to render it in a swirling array of colours, or to capture the essence of its power: "I saw ugliness become suffering become beauty."
Following on the success of The Helsinki Roccamatios, Martel set himself to work on his first novel, Self (Knopf Canada, 1996).
Martel is an earnest and engaging interview subject, who responds to questions quickly and at length, forgoing the careful rehearsal that reduces answers to a succession of generic sound bites delivered almost without regard to what the question is. He shows no sign of having been affected by the attention his arrival on the literary scene has generated. He shrugs off the conventional worries of the Canadian writer: sales, finding a sufficient market in Canada to survive, cracking into the United States. Self, like The Helsinki Roccamatios, will be released in Britain and is being shopped around Europe. He has discovered that writing is the task from which he derives most satisfaction, and appears content to be doing what he most wants to do-to be creating material that explores the aspects of the human predicament that preoccupy him.
He is on the one hand cosmopolitan, and on the other matter-of-factly Canadian. The son of Canadian diplomats (his father Emile has won the Governor General's award for poetry), he was born in Spain thirty-three years ago. Having grown up in a variety of foreign countries, undaunted by foreign places, languages, or cultures, he uses Canadian settings without the least self-consciousness. Unlike many young writers, he doesn't hide out in exotic locales for texture. Peterborough, where he studied philosophy at Trent University, is the inspiration for Roetown, one of the backdrops to Self, and the place where the Roccamatios have their genesis.
Travel nonetheless is an important part of his life, an important source of experience. Parts of Self were written during journeys through Iran and India ("I had intended to finish it in India, but it's impossible to write there: the noise, the crowds, the heat"). Much of his narrator's early self-discovery comes from the road: in Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Mexico.
Fluently bilingual, he writes, not in his mother tongue (French), but in the language of his education. Currently in the process of settling down in Montreal, Martel hasn't bothered to let the politics of duality intrude on his work, although he mentions in passing the linguistic intolerance of the Ottawa of his youth, as well as the ethnic hodgepodge that is Montreal. He once dreamed of a career as a politician, like the narrator of Self-another resemblance between them is that they both say writing was "the last thing on my list of things to do."

He readily admits to being an inefficient writer, wedded until recently to writing everything out long-hand. Once it was organized, the writing of Self flowed quite smoothly, though he allows that he "can agonize endlessly over things like commas." His obsession with punctuation explains a marvellous passage in "Donald J. Rankin", where he expounds on Joseph Conrad's brilliant use of a semi-colon in Almayer's Folly.
He recalls Conrad at length in Self (one of the narrator's lovers is a Conrad scholar). Not surprisingly, he claims a particular fondness for Conrad's awesome descriptive ability, a quality that has drawn him to the other writers he cites as particular favourites: Updike, Nabokov, Patrick White, Yukio Mishima, Knut Hamsun. "They use language like a magic wand," he says admiringly.

He worked for four years on the book, but it actually had its genesis years earlier. "Back in university I came across a study that asked a group of children to imagine what it would be like to be the opposite sex. Most of the girls could quite easily conceive of being boys; but the boys responded with real horror at the prospect of becoming girls." Martel relates the story with some bemusement.
"I gradually became aware of how the male ethos predominates. And I wondered why women should be such complete mysteries to men," he goes on, expressing the universal male conundrum. "After all, we're the same species, we all have mothers, many of us have sisters, most of us have made love to women. And yet men can't imagine being women."
Nor, he argues, are men able to imagine the harassments, alienation, and discomforts women face as a matter of course.
"Women live with a pervasive fear, such as most men never know; the awareness that they simply can't deal with every situation." And they are reminded of that every time they are burdened with an unwanted advance, or hesitate to walk down a street because a stranger has preceded them.
Martel's narrator reflects on this state of affairs, asking, "Where do men feel ill at ease?" After nearly a page of considering the possibilities, the inevitable conclusion is reached: "A man will never be told that he is not welcome because he is a man."
In Self we journey with the narrator, from his earliest memories to the age of thirty, embracing all the turbulence of emotional and physical maturation. His parents are diplomats; after studying at a small Canadian university that could be Trent, he becomes a writer and world traveller. At the core of the novel is the gender metamorphosis of a very sexual individual. Through metamorphosis, the narrator lives relationships free of the usual constraints of predetermined roles.
"I wanted to play with the idea of a sex change." As in Kafka's Metamorphosis, there is a magical quality to the transformations the narrator experiences. "For some reason, people expect some mammoth change with a transformation of sex. So, I wanted to imagine whether this would be the case. And the best way to become familiar with something is to visit it."
Part of this visiting consisted of wide-ranging research, the reading of stacks of feminist literature, Camille Paglia, The Female Eunuch, Orlando, and the erotic writings of women. He also read many rape testimonials, to try to comprehend the true vulgar brutality of the crime. He puts this to use in composing a devastating rape scene that oozes terror and revulsion, without the subliminal titillation that often underlies such passages.
He recalls having read of rape being described as an "unacknowledged holocaust".
"Somehow many people still fantasize about rape as sexual. They don't think of being punched in the face, bruised, torn."
To convey the pain and fear of the victim, he innovatively splits the page into columns, one side being the narrative of what happens, the other exposing the inner thoughts of the character. The reader's eye skips erratically between the columns, superimposing one over the other until the two perspectives merge.
He first used this technique in "The Mirror Machine", another story in Helsinki Roccamatios . A conversation between grandmother and grandson drones on until all the grandson is left hearing is a blah-blah-blah, while his mind wanders. Martel seems disappointed that some critics dismissed the split page as gimmicky. Actually, it is an effective means for a first-person narration to be both inside and outside the narrator's head at the same time, in real time for the reader.
Despite his evident open-mindedness to the task, it is no easy chore to evince the mind-set of the opposite sex. Martel makes some interesting observations about how the sexes differ.
"I've noticed that only women say, `A woman wouldn't act that way,' confident of their ability to speak on behalf of their gender. A man would never think of doing that because a man knows men are capable of doing anything, from mass murder to the worst sexual perversion."
At least part of the explanation for this lies in the expectations of men. Martel elaborates, saying, "There are no definitions applied to white, heterosexual males which express limitations. So we grow up to think of ourselves as king of the hill.
"That's why I think so many men go through a mid-life crisis at forty-five," he muses. "Only then do they face up to the reality that there are limitations. Whereas women are confronted with the idea that they are limited far earlier."
Being freed of previous limitations, the narrator of Self has to be approached without static reference to prescribed roles. And the universal experiences of love, loss, pain, and joy pay little heed to such roles.
In one of the book's most poignant passages, the narrator recounts with disarming simplicity the end of a relationship: "We returned to our gaze of old, eye to eye, smile to smile, memory to memory. Then, with serene, good-bye smiles, we backed into our rooms and into our roles, she to her wide heterosexual bed, I to my uncertain single bed. It was over. We must let things pass." Reference to gender doesn't matter. Martel succeeds in capturing the essence of the emotion in parting.

Busy as he has been with a hectic schedule of cross-Canada readings of Self, he has not settled on his next project. He recently completed his first screenplay, a version of his short story "Manners of Dying".
Critics have responded to Self with enthusiasm, as they did to Roccamatios. Martel has been hailed as one of the most promising Canadian writers to emerge in some time. His vision and daring speak for the likelihood that he will go on to create a body of talented work.

Tod Hoffman is a Montreal freelance writer.