ralentina reviewed Orlando by Virginia Woolf
An unexpected ride
4 stars
I heard about Orlando a lot before reading it, obviously, and yet I knew little about it. I knew Orlando starts off as a man and becomes a woman, and all queers have gone crazy about this fact ever since. I knew it was a touch problematic in its treatment of race and 'the Orient', and I knew that some find it boring. That was about it.
My expectations were low, but actually I enjoyed it a lot, in a very uneven way. Some parts are, objectively speaking, really boring. Orlando is prone to philosophising, and Virginia to satirising philosophers, and I often didn't know which of these I was witnessing. Orlando writes terrible poetry, as do most poets in the book, and there are quite a few. The dream sequences are probably meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but they are still dream sequences. And yet...
Virginia is hilarious and I …
I heard about Orlando a lot before reading it, obviously, and yet I knew little about it. I knew Orlando starts off as a man and becomes a woman, and all queers have gone crazy about this fact ever since. I knew it was a touch problematic in its treatment of race and 'the Orient', and I knew that some find it boring. That was about it.
My expectations were low, but actually I enjoyed it a lot, in a very uneven way. Some parts are, objectively speaking, really boring. Orlando is prone to philosophising, and Virginia to satirising philosophers, and I often didn't know which of these I was witnessing. Orlando writes terrible poetry, as do most poets in the book, and there are quite a few. The dream sequences are probably meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but they are still dream sequences. And yet...
Virginia is hilarious and I would have never guessed it. She makes light of heroes, hers included, of gender clichés, of the British aristocracy. The portrait of queen Elizabeth's hands and her smell of camphor is so so good. The descriptions of time passing made me laugh out loud: the Elizabethan era gruesomely washed away as the ice melts, the Victorian permanently wet and cloudy. And the gender switching is much more 'modern' than I had feared, with so many characters, Orlando included, fluidly presenting as male or female and defying gender expectations.
