Orlando: A Biography
Customer Review: Milord! Milady!
This `roman cl s’ is very original. The hero continues to live in different historical periods and undergoes a sex change.
However, it is written in an emotional, sentimental, superlative style: `society in the reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled brilliance. The graces were supreme.’
Except for the first period, there are no conflicts, only rather superficial descriptions of the mood and spirits of the times. For V. Woolf, `to give a truthful account of society … only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it – the poets and novelists – can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the causes where the truth does not exist.’
`Orlando’ is a perfect flight from reality: `But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.’ `Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party … should be left to the historian.’
This book is a clean, introvert, aristocratic, long ode to pure Beauty.
Only for Virginia Woolf fans.
Customer Review: This Book is Still Hip — Hard to Believe Written and Published in 1928 Edwardian England [63]
Written in 1928, this book clearly sought to shock the reading public. For every repression delivered by Victorian authorities which surely hampered Woolf’s freedoms, this book delivers a defiant rebuke to the same.
Orlando – it states in the beginning – is a man for whom “there can be no doubt of his sex.” He is rich, handsome and lives a life even Hugh Hefner may be jealous of. But, scandals lead him to isolation, to public ridicule or upbraiding, which led him to sequester himself to his 200-bedroom hermitage-castle. In his hermit’s existence, he does not pass time philandering, but instead pulls books off the library’s shelves and romanticizes with fiction.
Eventually tedium compels Orlando to ask his friendly king to deliver him overseas where he can perform the duties of ambassador. He ends up in then Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. While living there, he ends one exhaustingly long night of debauchery and partying with a seven day sleep – and awakes a woman.
This was a “good thing.” As a man, he could not appreciate Tennyson, Shakespeare, Byron and the like. As a woman, their written word touched her greatly. She could be red eyed, she could be lachrymose. As a man, he never loved. Wollf says, “. . . love – as the male novelists define it . . . has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity or poetry. . .” Orlando the man had no love? Maybe, with Sasha (a Russian seductress) – but maybe Sasha ruined him so that he could never love again.
As a woman, Orlando knows love. Wolff explains, “Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and – “
Can you imagine the Victorians reading that?!
Orlando’s life continues not for decades, but centuries. And, some other characters do as well. “The true length of a person’s life . . . is always a matter of dispute. Indeed, it is a difficult business – this time-keeping thing. . . ” Indeed, it was for Wolff who quite intentionally delivers this novel as a time-challenged writer.
More obscurities arise – androgynous lovers, angels’ visits, children born from or for Orlando – and splendor with these very biologically-defying events.
This is not written in the weaving masterful language which Woolf delivers in “To the Lighthouse” or “Mrs.Dalloway.” Instead, here the schizophrenia lies with the main character, not the writing style. Probably, a better story than “Lighthouse” or “Dalloway”, but I am partial to the writing style of those masterpieces.
In any event, anyone wondering just how throttled Woolf felt in the stifling moral norms of her country, read this book. If anyone wants a bizarre tale about a bizarre man/woman, this is a must read.
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