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    Orlando
    Orlando
    Orlando
    Libro electrónico239 páginas6 horas

    Orlando

    Por Virginia Woolf

    4/5

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    Información de este libro electrónico

    Toda la producción literaria de Virginia Woolf está ligada a su peripecia vital y Orlando no es un caso distinto. Su amante Vita Sackville-West fue quien la inspiró en esta novela. Pero ella no es Orlando, claro. Orlando es un ser imposible de abarcar, que vive en cinco siglos distintos (desde mediados del siglo xvi hasta principos del XX), que cambia de sexo sin cambiar de identidad, que es embajador y vive una temporada con un grupo itinerante de gitanos… Orlando es un ser en busca de su plenitud vital, visto desde la óptica de un biógrafo peculiar, irónico y que parodia el propio género. Porque Orlando es muchos Orlandos.

    Con esto, la historia, ambientada siempre en sugerentes escenarios e impregnados la particular obsesión de la autora por el transcurso del tiempo, se desliza como un deslumbrante cuento de hadas ante los fascinados ojos del lector. En definitiva, Orlando (1928) es, sobre todo, un texto peculiar y tremendamente original, una novela tan maravillosa como difícilmente clasificable. Sólo una agilidad narrativa como la de Woolf podía trenzar un juego literario semejante, y sólo un autor como Borges estaba en condiciones de verterla a nuestra lengua.

    Hay una guía de lectura disponible para el profesorado, pueden solicitarla a la editorial Edhasa por correo electrónico.
    IdiomaEspañol
    EditorialEDHASA
    Fecha de lanzamiento12 mar 2022
    ISBN9788435048606
    Orlando
    Autor

    Virginia Woolf

    Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

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    Comentarios para Orlando

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    • 3/5
      In this strange book, fantastically privileged protagonist Orlando sails through time periods and genders, starting out as a male during the Renaissance and ending up as a female during the early twentieth century. There are some witty remarks about the British literary canon (when was the last time you had a laugh at Alexander Pope's expense?), and sharp observations about gender roles, but overall, this book is an achievement to be admired rather than a work to be loved.
    • 3/5
      A satire on gender. This book was written in 1928 and covers 300 years but Orlando hardly ages and changes from man to woman. It is biography of Ms Woolf's poet friend/lover Vita Sackville-West, but it is also fictionalized and it is satirical.
    • 4/5
      "Orlando" is one of those books that is not about what you think it is about. I watched the movie years ago and thought I knew what this book was going to be, but what the movie focuses on and what the book is about are two different things. It is, of course, about the sexes, but also about personhood, time, literature, history. Woolf has a wonderful way of lifting the reader's own perception of the story so beyond plot and character that I, at least, have a hard time remembering what actually happens, and want to reread the book just for the exhilaration of the flight through its pages.
    • 3/5
      Some classics are too strange for me, but I managed to hang on for this one.
    • 3/5
      I can't believe this book was published in 1928, almost 100 years ago! It is a fascinating classic, particularly in its views on gender and the roles assigned to women and men in our society. It feels very modern. I felt like it worked more as a discussion of that theme than as a fictional biography of Orlando. I cared more about those thoughts than about how Orlando's life progressed. “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”“By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
    • 5/5
      I laughed out loud a lot more than I expected. Unusually, I thoroughly enjoyed this book without particularly liking any of the characters in it -- perhaps because the narrator was such a strong (and delightful) presence. For me, it was all about the metacommentary.
    • 5/5
      This is a complex classic, genre bending as well as gender bending. What I love most about it, however, isn't the interplay between forms and voices, or the entrancing plot. It's the language, the sheer flow of beautiful English. For such an intellectual writer Woolf triumphs here in vividly physical imagery, in prose the trembles into poetry, in wit and cadence and so many instances of le mot juste. Loved it when I was 15, still love it at 75. It has certainly aged better than I have!
    • 2/5
      If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Biological Constructs: "Orlando" by Virginia Woolf(Original Review, 2002-06-18)I’m probably in a minority, but I find Woolf hugely overrated. A snob in the way that Wilde was a snob before her, sucking up to the wealthy and titled and, like Wilde, happy to be unfaithful if it ingratiated her with the gentry. People go on about ‘a room of one’s own’ but have they read the whole piece? She thought only a few superior personages should be allowed to write, and then only for a select audience.
    • 2/5
      A surreal novel, unmoored from conventional time framework, centred on an immortal, sometimes male and sometimes female. Woolf was a highly skilled writer, and though the work is sometimes entertaining, overall, I found this exercise dull.
    • 2/5
      about a person that changes genders and lives over several centuries
    • 4/5
      I read this one not knowing exactly what it was about - and I find a very funny, well written, Satire-ish book on what it means to be man or a woman in the British England. First - this is a book you have to read carefully. Orlando doesn't age like a regular person, so years pass, societal beliefs, and general culture change in a blink of an eye. But, it is written in an easy style, with a light touch that makes it a very accessible book. It's a completely different style than Virginia Woolf's other books (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, etc.)Ms. Woolf has a way of writing that manages to capture the absurdity of culture's expectation of both being Male and being Female. Orlando, being both at different times, shows just how limiting both are sexes are. Its also a critique of Victorian England and how stifling it is to women.
    • 1/5
      Possibly one of the strangest novels I've ever read. So... flexible (for lack of a better term) in time and gender, not to mention the legality of identity. I finished it thinking how the story worked which was amazing because logically it doesn't work what so ever.
    • 3/5
      Woolf presents a satirical biography of Orlando, a young man who lives for over 300 years and has a mysterious transformation into being a women along the way. It's never clear how it is Orlando is able to gain this immortality (perhaps his obsession with thought, words, poetry?) or how it is that Orlando becomes a woman, which worked for the way the story unfolded. I really wanted to be charmed by this, as I had been with other books by Woolf, but whereas the vibrancy of language and compactness of the stories in both To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway delighted me, Orlando failed to hold my attention. Also, I was deeply bothered the racism within the book, particularly the opening scene (in which Orlando toys with the head of a nameless dead Moor), but also by the Orientalism in the scenes in Turkey and the portrayal of the "gipsies." The fact that the story was "of it's time" is not enough to shake the unsettled feeling from me.
    • 4/5
      "A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth."—Orlando by Virginia WoolfParenthetical with pleonastic dalliances, Woolf’s “Orlando” was a joy to read aloud. Gender-bending throughout the ages, breaking the fourth wall of literature as well as sexual taboos, forging a weapon of fiction that was usually beaten on the anvil by calloused, masculine hands. Her work may not always resonate with me, but the echoes off the walls sure sound nice. A novel about a poet would normally push me to the wall, find a stud (or mare) and pound my brow flat with repeated blows. Writing about a writer is as dirty a trick as reading your own poetry in public, measuring one’s pink parsnip with a tape measure in a late night dick pic, writing yourself into a screenplay as the main character or revving your engine at a stoplight while scrolling through insipid social media. Fortunately, this classic was more about the interplay of sex in literature and whose voice will be paramount amongst the crashing icebergs in a freshly thawed river. And, zounds! Gerunds abound! Well, at least in the second sentence of this reviewnotreview of a manwomanman tripping over three hundred years. It’s all I’ve got time for. My own shit to scrawl. In a quarter of the time (if I’m lucky). And so:“Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful; he alone is at peace.”
    • 1/5
      Not what I like about VW's writing. Didn't finish.
    • 3/5
      I'm not sure what to make of this. As a novel, far too many things are left hanging or unexplained. How come Orlando can live for 400 years and be 36 being just one... As a thought provoking piece of writing, however, it asks a lot of questions that are not uncontroversial now, so goodness only knows what it was like when it was published. On the face of it, Orlando is a biography of the titular character, an Elizabethan Nobleman who has too much time on his hands and a penchant for poetry. He goes to Constantinople as ambassador and comes back transformed into a woman. From that point, the love of literature persists, although the adjustment to life as a woman takes some time. The questions raised are about who we are, the face we present to the world. Orlando starts as a man, ends as a woman, and so has a lot of adjusting to do, in terms of what is expected of her now in her thought, speech, dress and behaviour. Why do we expect, even now, women and men to act differently in the same situations? Then there are questions about conformity, Orlando feels obliged to conform to the times she lives in, but how to do that while remaining true to herself. Some people are of their time, others appear to be ahead or living in the past. They're all equally valuable, should they conform and change their thinking to accommodate their times? There's a lot of what might be described as the thought police
    • 4/5
      Everyone in our book circle agreed that this was a funny book, not what you would expect from Woolf, but it is after all a gloss on Vita Sackville-West and Woolf's complicated relationship with her. What is impressive: Well, for one, the brilliant evocation of such different times across the four and a half centuries of Orlando's existence. As Karenmarie mentioned, the evocation of a frozen Thames and the celebrations on the ice, and then the breakup and disaster that came after, are beautifully realized. And this continues through the coming times, in England and in Constantinople and in the gypsy camp. Then there are the changing attitudes toward women in society that Orlando lives through and adjusts to. And there are the sly sideswipes and writers past and present, which in some cases were laugh-out-loud funny.My edition had notes in the back to help readers who don't know the historical references. Sometimes they were a bit overdone, but often helpful.Sometimes it feels a bit like an adult fairy tale, or a fantasy adventure. Sackville-West's life has something to do with that, but to read this only as a roman-a-clef would do it an injustice. So much daring in Woolf's time and before had to do with breaking conventions that deserved to be broken, it's hardly avoidable to see this as a social commentary as well as a romp.
    • 3/5
      Another classic I had to read for a research project. And I liked it even less than I thought I would. I have no idea why the "experts" rave about this so much... as a lesbian love letter to someone "in the know" (i.e. they have a clue what Woolf was going on about) maybe it is okay. But as a story?? not so much... there is no plot and no suspense... Basically it is a biography of a woman who pretends to be a man so she can have sex with women (and some transgender theorists claim she was transgendered but I didn't see this, I just saw a lesbian trying to live as a man in a world that didn't allow lesbians) and writes page after page about their clothing, their culture, their houses, their roads, their scenery.... ad nauseam.Again, I tried to read this in text form but the paragraphs are very very long and it was hard to keep my place without my eyes glazing over in boredom, so I got it in audio... which was better, only because my eyes no longer hurt.
    • 5/5
      "Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it ? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story."

      What a ride! Virginia Woolf and I don't often get on. At all. I usually despair over her stream-of-consciousness style of writing and her characters. So, I approached Orlando with some trepidation. And what happens? Woolf pulls this masterpiece of a romp out of the hat which shows not only that she was a very clever writer but that she also had a delicious sense of humor.

      Of course, it may be that that side of hers does only show in Orlando because it is a mock biography of and a tribute to Vita Sackville-West. One review I read even described the book as one of the most marvelous of love letters ever written - though both Virginia and Vita might have disagreed.

      According to Nigel Nicolson, both Vita and Virginia denied rumors spread by Vita's mother that their liaison was a serious one:
      "She told me that everything was true except the part about Virginia endangering their marriage, but none of it mattered a hoot because the love they bore each other was so powerful that it could withstand anything. ‘My diary entry for Sunday, 28 May, three weeks later, reads: Virginia and Leonard came to lunch . Virginia looking well and happy after her Italian trip. She listened to the whole story of my visit to Brighton with her head bowed. Then she said: “The old woman ought to be shot”."
      (Nigel Nicolson - Portrait Of A Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson)

      Apart from the biographical aspect of Orlando being the fictionalised account of Vita's life, the book also amazes in that it dares to address the issues of identity and gender-bending or rather gender-switching - making it one of the most outspoken works of literature of its time to criticise a society that would condemn people to distinct roles based on their gender.

      "And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head. ‘A pox on them!’ she said, realizing for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood."

      Of course there are many other topics that Woolf takes up in Orlando, such as the nature of time, the vanity of poets, the nostalgia for things in the past which blinds us from an appreciation of the present, etc. but I have to admit that most of my admiration for Orlando is based on how Woolf reflects some of Vita's convictions in her fictionalised account and how to the point Orlando seems as a character who is at home in his/her identity.
      Having read Nigel Nicolson's biography of Vita, his mother, at the same time asOrlando, it was delightful to see the links between the two accounts of someone who possessed a rather unconventional outlook for her time:

      "I hold the conviction that as centuries go on, and the sexes become more nearly merged on account of their increasing resemblances, I hold the conviction that such connections will to a very large extent cease to be regarded as merely unnatural, and will be understood far better, at least in their intellectual if not in their physical aspect. (Such is already the case in Russia.) I believe that then the psychology of people like myself will be a matter of interest, and I believe it will be recognized that many more people of my type do exist than under the present-day system of hypocrisy is commonly admitted."
      (Nigel Nicolson - Portrait Of A Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson)
    • 3/5
      Surreal and eclectic. As a piece of allegory, this was an interesting book. A bit long-winded in places but still mostly entertaining.
    • 4/5
      I struggled with this. I always expect to love Virginia Woolf's novels but the stream of consciousness style is a bit of a chore for me, ashamed as I am to admit it. There were a lot of in-jokes in this and I felt a very strong sense of nudging or smirking from the author, which I tired of. It seems like she wrote it for her inner circle and I consequently felt excluded from full enjoyment of it. That said, it is a cleverly crafted farce with exploration of gender roles which would have been ground-breaking at the time.
    • 5/5
      It’s a mistake to reduce this book, as Vita Sackville-West’s son did, to ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’. I hate that characterization. While clearly inspired (and dedicated) to her lover for a few years in the mid 1920’s, an affair that neither husband apparently objected to, this book is far more than that. In ‘Orlando’ Woolf explores the individual’s role in society, what it means to be a woman or a man, what it means to be rich, and in short, what it means to live. Along the way she is whimsical, fantastical, and progressive in both her experimental prose, and her feminism. This is a profound book, not a simple expression of adoration. Much is made of Orlando ‘magically’ transforming into a woman midway through the book, and in the fact that he, then she, lives for hundreds of years, both of which are completely unexplained by Woolf. In having Orlando transform into a woman, and in describing her later as having multiple selves, all at the same time, Woolf explodes the view that we as individuals are one thing, or need to define ourselves that way. In having Orlando live for centuries, she shows that cultural norms will change, and that even though we may not always perceive that fact, we can open our minds, live unconstrained, and embrace progress. Included in what’s arbitrary are clothing and sexual preference, which is liberating. At the same time, the book is sentimental at times. Written at age 46, Woolf both remembered her past through mature eyes, and had a better understanding of her own mortality. This manifests itself in Orlando’s character as having her essentially be middle-aged across centuries, observing changes in London, society, and scientific progress, while occasionally calling up memories from long ago. This puts our situation as individuals with relatively short lives in extremis, magnifying the act of recollection and memory that normally spans decades, and yet also shows the thread of humanity at large continuing on through all these years.Woolf was troubled, having suffered sexual abuse by two older half-brothers growing up, and headaches throughout her life which culminated in occasional breakdowns, and her tragic suicide at age 59. Read her words, look at the beautiful pictures of Vita which illustrate the book, particularly “Orlando on her return to England”, and enjoy her moment in the sun.Quotes:On how complex individuals are; I loved this one, especially with the tongue-in-cheek ‘unwieldy length of this sentence’:“Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher’s a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer ‘Yes’; if we are truthful we say ‘No’; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect ragbag of odds and ends within us – a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil – but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.”On memories, and the art of life:“’Time has passed over me,’ she thought, trying to collect herself; ‘this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors – as I do now,’ here she stepped on to the pavement of Oxford Street, ‘what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?’ Her eyes filled with tears.That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will, perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her motor car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past.”On the rich:“Looked at from the gipsy point of view, a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who snatched land money from people who rated these things of little worth, and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one. She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field; house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or heroes, or great benefactors of the human race.”On scientific progress:“The very fabric of life now, she thought, as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying – but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.”On sex, I loved how she put this:“In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse.”On sexual identity:“The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing more openly than usual – openness indeed was the soul of her nature – something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. 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 what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result every one has had experience…”
    • 3/5
      'The longest and most charming love letter in literature.’Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is the well known story an English Nobleman who works for the Queen in Elizabethan times. He has his heart broken by a Russian princess, and so he decides to leave the country. He becomes an ambassador for England in the city of Constantinople. During a fight in Constantinople, Orlando falls into a deep sleep, awakening days later as a woman. The novel then returns to England, where Orlando must take her place as an English woman in 19th century society.I'm not entirely sure this book was for me. The more I reflect on reading it, the more I'm not entirely sure I enjoyed it. I have only read one other book by Virginia Woolf and that was Mrs Dalloway, and that too gives me that same sense of “what did I just read?” I guess my feelings are partly due to Woolf’s stream of consciousness style. It’s very quick and I sometimes felt lost, like I was reading pages and pages and wasn’t entirely sure what the point was. I put this book down so many times and it took me a good while to finish it.That being said, I still think Orlando is a pretty interesting work, and I much prefer it to Mrs Dalloway. Orlando has a lot to say about women and the way women are treated. The story is written as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, a woman Virginia Woolf had an affair with. It shows the passion of the Elizabethan age as well as both resenting and craving the idea of love.It is written in a very experimental style, it has a biographical feel to it, and I liked the elements in which the narrator stepped in to say a few words. It was full of wit and humour, as well as telling a very tender love story. It has very beautiful writing and imagery, but I still found it a very strange book to read.There is also a rather interesting film adaptation with Tilda Swinton, and I have to say it does a pretty great job of converting the book to the screen. While this book may not have been entirely for me, I think it’s a really important piece of literature. It discusses a lot about writing and why people choose to write, and overall is an immensely influential piece of writing.
    • 5/5
      This book was so much fun. The whole time I was reading it, I felt like I could picture Virginia Woolf with an amused smile on her face, half making fun of herself and half making fun of her wider circle of friends. Orlando is the biography of Orlando who starts out as a young man living in the Elizabethan era of the 1500s and ends the book as a 36 year old woman in 1928. Along the way he/she has many life experiences, travels, and forays into writing. It's hard to say what this book is actually "about", but it's fun to read, amusing, and clever in the best senses of all of those words. Woolf makes no apologies or explanations for Orlando's sex change or longevity. I was expecting all of this to be confusing and shrouded in mystery, but Woolf just clearly lays out the events and expects the reader to go along. I loved it. I'd recommend reading some of Woolf's other works first or you might not get the lighter, more playful tone that she uses in this novel.
    • 4/5
      Woolf takes on the role of "biographer" to Orlando, who starts out as a young man in Elizabethan England. At a point in the book when he is about thirty years old, some magic occurs and he becomes a woman. He is the same person as before, just now in skirts and a different place in society. The change gives plenty of room for commentary on society and typical attitudes to and about women. This is pretty much what I expected, but I also found out something I didn't expect at all: Virginia Woolf had a sense of humor.Many parts of this book are funny. Quotably funny, although Woolf does love a sentence that runs on (she actually even pokes fun at that at one point!). She has humorous things to say about men, women, the relationships between them, writing, writers, society, politics, you name it. I was convinced I was going to love this book unabashedly, and then it inexplicably bogs down about two-thirds of the way through it. By then Orlando is living in the modern age (1920s). The immortality, unlike the gender transformation, has never been explained at all, by the way. I don't know exactly how Woolf lost me here, but she did. Maybe it wasn't as funny anymore? Maybe it was that the weirdness had piled on top of itself to a point that it no longer worked? I don't know exactly what happened, but the last part was a slog for me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed much about this book and came away with pages of quotes pulled from it.Recommended for: people who like snarkQuote: "No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high."
    • 4/5
      I've read some Virginia Woolf before but this is very different. In fact, in a strange way what it reminds me of more than anything is A Hundred Days of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: there are definite overtones of magic realism here. Orlando is introduced to the reader as he practises his fencing by attacking the dried up heads of Moors brought back from the crusades by his father (or was it grandfather) in the attic of the mansion owned by his family for generations. And this is the first clue perhaps that time in this book does not flow as quickly as might be expected, for Orlando is a boy in the later days of Elizabeth I, and the crusades are long gone. But his ambitions of martial glory are thwarted by the Queen, who ordains that a military life is too dangerous for her favourite. So Orlando becomes a young man at the court of Elizabeth I and falls in and out of love, all the while concealing his desire to write, as to be a writer is not at all a respectable thing for an aristocrat. But time passes very slowly indeed for Orlando (although in the best tradition of magic realism, this is not commented on, or even seemingly noticed by Orlando himself or those around him) When Orlando requests the king to send him abroad as an ambassador to avoid the unwanted attentions of a suitor, the king is Charles II, more than seventy years have passed since he was the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, but Orlando is still a young man of less than thirty. And it's while an ambassador to the Turkish Court at Constantinople that Orlando's life changes for ever, as he becomes a woman overnight. There is no explanation of this, and although there are court cases aplenty to determine his legal situation on his return to England, the reality of the situation is accepted without query by all around him.On my first reading of the book I was expecting a very different book from the one that I thought I eventually got, and I think that detracted slightly from my enjoyment. On this second reading I just went with the flow and enjoyed the ride, as here when the break-up of the frozen Thames is being described:'Where for three months and more, there had been solid ice of such thickness that it seemed permanent as stone, and a whole gay city has been stood on its pavement, was now a race of turbulent yellow waters. The river had gained its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur spring (to which view many philosophers inclined) had risen from the volcanic regions beneath and burst the ice asunder with such vehemence that it swept the huge and massy fragments furiously apart. The mere look of the water was enough to turn one giddy. All was riot and confusion. The river was strewn with icebergs. Some of these were as broad as a bowling green and as high as a house; others no bigger than a man's hat, but most fantastically twisted. Now would come down a whole convoy of ice blocks sinking everything that stood in their way. Now, eddying and swirling like a tortured serpent, the river would seem to be hurtling itself between the fragments and tossing them from bank to bank, so they could be heard smashing against the piers and pillars. But what was the most awful and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human creatures who had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting and precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they jumped into the flood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain.'A strange book that is apparently a tribute to Vita-Sackville-West. Nothing is ever explained, and quite a lot makes very little sense but it has some interesting thoughts on gender and the nature of time.
    • 3/5
      I didn't particularly enjoy Virginia Woolf's "Orlando". It was a rather fantastical yet dull story.... and I really wasn't able to discern what Woolf was trying to say.There are a few brilliant passages of prose -- particularly the part with the frozen river Thames. The story is of a man who turns into a woman and then lives 300 years.... I'm not sure what the point of it all was. This is the fourth Woolf book I've read and she clearly isn't a good match for me. I only really enjoyed "The Years," which has a much more traditional narrative and style. There are several authors that I feel like I'm just not smart enough to understand and Woolf is among them.
    • 3/5
      Orlando features less of the beautiful prose passages that I associate with Woolf's writing than her other works, which leaves the story to carry much of the burden. Unlike Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (and I suspect The Waves, which I shall read shortly), there is an actual story here focusing on the life of the titular Orlando. Orlando occupies a strange semi-supernatural role where both sex and gender shift and the years pass without leaving much trace. It's an interesting center for the story in theory, though in practice I found Orlando to be a rather uninteresting character who goes from a pining youth to a married woman without inspiring much interest or sympathy from me. The character exists in different time periods more than s/he lives in them, making the different ages mere window dressing. Eventually the book ends, though it doesn't feel so much like the story has concluded as it does that Woolf thought she had written enough.

      Decidedly different from most Woolf in both style and substance, I thought this one was alright.
    • 5/5
      A lovely, lively meditation on biography, history, reading, human nature and sexuality. Amusing, witty, and thought-provoking all at once. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      In a graduate class on Victorian Literature at Baylor, we read most of Woolf’s works. I had come to the class having only read Mrs. Dalloway, which I greatly enjoyed. Orlando immediately became another favorite of her novels. On October 5, 1927, Virginia Woolf began writing a story she had worked through her mind for months. Now Woolf, an early modernist influenced by James Joyce, is most certainly an acquired taste. The novel, Orlando, is, as she wrote, a fictional “biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing until the present day” (Nissley, A Reader’s Book of Days 316). I decided to revisit this unusual novel, but a rather peculiar thing happened to me. I found the story a tough read, and as the novel progressed, I found it harder and harder to continue. For once a novel did not stay with me, and I can say I did not enjoy the read at all.The story begins with Orlando, a handsome young man, heir of titles and lands dating back to William the Conquerer. He becomes a favorite of Queen Bess. As Woolf writes, “For the old woman loved him. And the Queen, who knew a man when she saw one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted for him a splendid ambitious career. Lands were given him, houses assigned him. He was to be the son of her old age; the limb of her infirmity; the oak tree on which she leant her degradation. She croaked out these promises and strange domineering tendernesses (they were at Richmond now) sitting bolt upright in her stiff brocades by the fire which, however high they piled it, never kept her warm” (9).Woolf, an ardent feminist, details the habits and peculiarities of men, and then turns her attentions to the onerous life of women with all the strictures placed upon them in regard to marriage, ownership of property, and public, as well as private, activities. She also comments on Elizabethan, Enlightenment, Victorian, and 20th century attitudes towards women.Woolf writes, “crime and poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning; none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call ‘life’ and ‘reality are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality; nor, indeed any equivalent for these two words at all” (13). Yes, these lines found themselves on paper in her distinctive purple ink in 1927.Orlando constantly struggles with loneliness and isolation concomitant with his position among the nobility. As he rises to the title of Duke, he begins to detest the hypocrisy of the upper class and the shallow gossip of those who pretend to intellectualism. Orlando befriends, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, and John Dryden attends gatherings with Swift, Johnson, and Boswell. Finally, an invitation is extended to Pope and Addison to her home, and there, they have tea and conversations worthy of those eminent men.Half way through Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the well-foxed old paperback began to fall apart, as if trying to end its own misery. But I have ordered a new copy, with annotations, and I will try again soon. So, I find myself perplexed. Do I dare reread Mrs. Dalloway? I think not. I will hold that one in my memory. Based on my read in 1995, or thereabouts, 5 stars--Chiron, 9/14/14

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    Orlando - Virginia Woolf

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