Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

A hard book to review. Woolf is obviously an amazing writer in language terms and that's what kept me going through the book. I'm not much for descriptions but she constantly manages to put a long set of things together in a way that summons the place in a nostalgic, dream like and beautiful way.

But... God her vision is so stupefyingly and tediously parochial. The most obvious "bad" thing is she uses the n word twice in a purely descriptive way for no reason. Bad. But there's also a chapter where she places Orlando in Istanbul during the height of the ottoman empire and she's unable to describe it as anything other than "barbarian", where they're presented as fools expecting Orlando to perform a public miracle for some reason. Then the chapter moves to her being in a Romany group and that is also racist and gross.

Even past the racism, Woolf never seems interested in depicting anything past her upper middle class horizons while being obsequious over Orlando being an aristocrat. It seems like hard work to make a 400 year romp through history seem so dull. The most common theme is about writing as writing and it's excruciatingly dull. The literary scene is hard to make interesting and Woolf doesn't even try.

Obviously the book is also a kind of love letter. The annotations are full of "oh this is a reference to X". It's pretty obvious even without context that a lot of stuff is about a specific person. I was actually drawn to reading it partly because of that but the overall effect is... Weird. It comes across as all an inside joke. And somehow not very... Loving, for a love letter. Heroising instead, I guess.

I just feel difficult about it. Maybe partly it's just that I can't read a book about an aristocrat without being repulsed. But by the end I just felt like I'd been pulled along on a journey with a travel partner who'd rather have just stayed at home in the first place.… (more)