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"Virginia Woolf's exuberant 'biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the 'life' that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. In this novel, Virginia Woolf plays loose and fast: Orlando uncovers a literary and sexual revolution overnight."--Jacket.… (more)
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. ( )
filled with humor and flowing prose, i enjoyed it completely. And much like To the Lighthouse I admit I got a bit lost there at the end. Woolfe's fluid treatment of time is amusing and beautiful when you managed to keep up, but every once in awhile can leave you tumbled by the side of the road. ( )
A self-indulgent flight of fantasy. But 40% of the way through it starts to get interesting and has some interesting things to say about men and women.
Next time anyone tries to tell you – as people often do – that Virginia Woolf was a cold fish, just direct them to her seductive writing about winter. It warms the heart.
He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
Quotations
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. (p. 11)
But worse is to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. (p. 53)
Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been The change of sex, through it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. (p. 97)
No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. (p. 105)
She was a man; she was a woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. (p. 112)
What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables! At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are oercome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing. (p. 124)
Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. (p. 132)
In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of that is above. (p. 133)
Nor were they (the geniuses) so different from the rest of us as one might have supposed. Addison, Pope, Swift proved, she found, to be fond of tea. They liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured glass. They adored grottos. Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise was delightful.... A piece of gossip did not come amiss. Nor were they without their jealousies. (p 146-147)
What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What have seven editions... got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? (p. 229)
Last words
And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight.
"Virginia Woolf's exuberant 'biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the 'life' that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. In this novel, Virginia Woolf plays loose and fast: Orlando uncovers a literary and sexual revolution overnight."--Jacket.
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***April Group Read: Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Wikipedia in English (2)
5
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. (