Orlando

Well here we go. I had actually forgotten about this little thing, and was thinking about the books I've been reading and - ah ha! I remembered.

Proceeding chronologically, the second book I read this summer was Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. My father sent me an article about the book - not a review - by a woman writing in the '60s. She and her cohort were avid Woolf fan while she was publishing novels, but were dismayed by Orlando. Too flippant, too flimsy, not the serious literary work they had come to expect. When the author re-read the book years later, she discovered aspects of it she had missed the first time around and thought more highly of it. I wish I could remember more of the article - it was quite good - but it's back in Berkeley for the summer.

Orlando was written in 1928, and is famously a fantasical biography of Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had a rather conspicuous affair. The books begins with a young man named Orlando, a young nobleman living in the Elizabethan age. Queen Elizabeth is enraptured by his beauty and offers him a place at court. There are many and sundry adventures - he falls in love with a Russian princess, sponsors a poet, becomes ambassador to Turkey and there he becomes a woman. The second half of the book details Orlando's life as a woman for a few hundred years, from the 1700's to the early 1900's. Orlando has a fascination with poetry and works throughout the novel on a poem called The Oak Tree.

So the story keeps changing, it feels more like small vignettes than a regular novel. The style of the book changes frequently, too. Some parts are your typical novel, others float between stream of consciousness and magical realism. Other parts are more like prose poems, tangents about love, the countryside, etc. Woolf's descriptions of each era are almost physical, very descriptive and vivid. She talks about the speed of one century, the heaviness of another. The book plays with time also, covering 50 years in the space of a page or taking 5 pages to cover a single thought.

I find Virginia Woolf's writing difficult to get into initially. I think this is because her writing isn't meant to simply move the story along, but is beautiful for its own sake, independent of the story. Focusing on the writing makes me enjoy the book more, and in Orlando, particularly, the writing is a large part of what makes the book so beautiful.

It is of couse, a very political book, examining gender norms and political constructs of place and poetry and other aspects of society. Apparently Woolf also meant the book to be cross-genre, categorizing it as both a fiction and a biography. It's not a book that's a quick read; it's fun but also contemplative.