Umbrella was published by Bloomsbury in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The novel is written as a single, unbroken paragraph — no chapter breaks, no section divisions, no white space — in a stream-of-consciousness style that moves freely between three time periods: 1918, when Audrey Death is a young suffragette and munitions worker in London during World War I; 1971, when the psychiatrist Zack Busner (a recurring Self character) attempts to awaken long-catatonic encephalitis lethargica patients at a mental hospital using L-DOPA; and 2010, when the elderly Busner revisits his past.
The encephalitis lethargica epidemic of 1917–1928 — the “sleepy sickness” that left millions of patients in catatonic or near-catatonic states for decades — is Self’s historical anchor. Oliver Sacks documented similar L-DOPA awakenings in Awakenings (1973), and Self acknowledges the debt, but his treatment is radically different: where Sacks wrote clinical narrative, Self writes modernist fiction that attempts to reproduce the subjective experience of consciousness disrupted, frozen, and reawakened.
The stream-of-consciousness technique is essential to Self’s project. Consciousness does not organize itself into chapters and paragraphs — it flows, doubles back, leaps across decades, conflates past and present. Self’s prose replicates this: a sentence begun in 1971 may end in 1918; a smell or sound in one time period triggers an associative leap to another. The reader must surrender linear expectations and trust the current of language.
The novel’s title refers to multiple umbrellas — literal parasols, the umbrella of the state, the protective canopy of consciousness itself — and Self deploys the image with the same associative logic that governs the prose. Umbrella is Self’s most formally ambitious work: a genuine attempt to write the 21st-century modernist novel, and one of the very few contemporary fictions to take the technical innovations of Joyce and Döblin seriously rather than merely citing them.
Collecting Umbrella
First edition (Bloomsbury, London, 2012): Cloth with dust jacket. Booker shortlist.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $15–$35