Orlando

A mythical, quite psychedelically written 'biography' over four centuries as Orlando moves from a boy under Queen Elizabeth, through countries, careers and personas including being nonplussed by her sudden overnight transformation into womanhood while ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Eventually passing through the Victorian era of misogynistic oppression, marriage, publishing her life long work of poetry and reflecting on her many lives in the early 20th century. The world here is just as it is, without explanation asked or given, as people fade away and back again over centuries.

I absolutely adore Woolf's prose and ethereal style which here feels like floating through Orlando's memories as hazily remembered mythologised rumours. This also makes it a difficult read in places if you are not in the space for it. I never connected to it as a kid, but certainly as the book reaches its final chapter, this feels like a work intended for someone who has lived a long life with a hundred lives and the world has passed by faster than they can recall. The eternal becomes fleeting, yet remains its core. Some passages I struggled with which made me want to skim. But then I re-read a few times to absorb it and it feet like letting wine sit on your tongue to mellow out and pick up the flavours. Not unique to Woolf of course but after reading mostly recent fiction lately, it is rarer to have prose take that risk with a reader.

Certainly its aspect on gender is fascinating and certainly stands out to me so much more since by transition. It feels far stronger than the film in that regard (I adore the film, though these are different beasts in many ways) in giving a narration on gender and the transcendence of it. I didn't expect to connect to it as a trans narrative as much as I did, all things considered, and in many ways it bares little resemblance to the trans narratives we see so often today. It is quiet, considered, self assured and reflective. Not to mention hilarious in places; Orlando herself is someone I could laugh with as deeply as debate with. There if feels like a strong element of Woolf punching through the pages with her offhand jokes on sexism and homophobia.

Small warning that there are some dated terms and attitudes concerning race, including on the first page and Woolf did hold racist and antisemitic views. Just to be clear for anyone who only knows her as a queer writer and hasn't read into her much before.

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.