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Oct 04, 2011

Kelly rated it:

My mom made me clean my room this weekend. No, not a teenage pain-in-the-ass cleaning of the room, this was THE cleaning of the room. As in, it was finally time to take apart the room I’d had in that house since we moved there somewhere around my thirteenth birthday.

Look you guys, I get it. I’m twenty-four. That’s another one of those Facts of Life that just happens to you, and most people would say I was far past time for this. And you know what? I was doing okay with it. It w More...

27 comments like (46 people liked it)

Jun 20, 2010

Elizabeth rated it:

Of the many things I love about Virginia Woolf -- and here my voice falls to a conspiratorial whisper as her Spirit may be hovering behind me with a school matron's ruler -- is her sense of fun. It's why I'm always comparing her and Jane Austen. They make me laugh, and in a way that those who approach them with all seriousness of Literature and possibly Critics behind them, will never see. Then Orlando will be dull or only appropriate for those who wish to speak about the aesthetics of androgyny More...

17 comments like (45 people liked it)

Jul 05, 2011

Miriam rated it:

Orlando was much funnier than I expected, and much less fantastical. Since I was familiar with the plot before beginning the book and had heard much literary criticism concerning the famed transformation, I was expecting the focus to be on gender issues. While these were certainly present, Woolf presents them fairly gently. Orlando is so strongly an individual that his/her sex hardly matters from a readerly standpoint. Indeed, I found it harder to believe that he was a successful ambassador than More...

0 comments like (10 people liked it)

Jun 02, 2008

Mina rated it:

I guess this is one of those books whose quality is determined by the lens with which it is read (see: Brideshead Revisited, The Custom of the Country). Which is to say, I dove into this novel expecting to wend through the modernist qualities of other Woolf books I had read--formal experimentation, themes of psychoanalysis, shifting perspective, etc.--and was quickly disappointed at the outset by the straightforward 19th century narrative.

This seems to be a common reaction to " More...

3 comments like (8 people liked it)

Aug 28, 2010

Maria added it

Este libro es tan reconfortante de leer como las ilustraciones de los cuentos de hadas. Cada frase está llena de perlas, plumas y otros muchos objetos coloridos y pequeños. He leído por ahí que es una carta de amor escrita en clave.
Sobre el amor, y el sexo, y la identidad sexual de Orlando he visto pocas cosas. Hay un momento hacia la mitad en el que ya no me parece ni hombre ni mujer, aunque sigue teniendo cuerpo.
Para mí este libro trata sobre la oportunidad que nos da la litera More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 15, 2010

Eric rated it:

Orlando lives five centuries, but to my mind Woolf endows only two of them, the sixteenth and the nineteenth, with anything like a full measure of her erudite brio and antiquarian fantasy. Nothing in the novel surpasses the Renaissance fantasia of the first chapter—sixty pages of the most enchanting, festive, parti-colored prose you’ll ever read. Orlando opens his/her eyes on the “Merrie” England young Yeats found in Spenser—the “indolent, demonstrative” England where “Men still wept when they w More...

7 comments like (13 people liked it)

Mar 26, 2011

Jamie rated it:

UPDATE 2011: On a third reading, I've finally come to love this novel in all of its ostentatious, fantastical, quirky bizarreness. Vita Sackville-West's son evidently thought it the most beautiful 'love letter' in the history of literature; Woolf's biting satire nevertheless shines through. Just stunning, and a particularly engaging, almost picaresque read for the uninitiated.

***

This is a book I'll have to come back to on my own one day. I remember trying to read it i More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 02, 2012

Paul rated it:

What's the connection between Virginia Woolf and the Russian mafia? Easy - in 1991 Sally Potter decided to film Orlando, one of the loveliest, most ravishing novels in the English language. Somewheres in the middle of the story there, you have a truly extraordinary sequence about the remarkable Frost Fair of 1654, which was when the River Thames itself froze over and they erected a fair with stalls and games and rides and greased pigs and whatnot on it, a carnival of the utmost brilliancy right More...

2 comments like (12 people liked it)

Jan 30, 2012

Joanna added it

Is it just me, or is Virginia Woolf rambling a bit in this one. Admittedly, we have much ground to cover if Orlando is going to live all the experiences of being a man and a woman in 400 short years. But aside from living the patriarchal, privileged life of a rich, androgynous, ageless god type, is Orlando ever really male? Personally I think that Orlando is Lesbian and then falls in love with a man, and that's a bit of a shock. But I don't buy the gender morph.

First of all, I have More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 01, 2010

Ben rated it:

But what is the present moment?! What does it involve? More than we know, of course. It involves the self, we know. Is that all we know? Me here, writing on my couch, and you, you there. But there is more! Here in this room there is more! A table, its wood, the details, labored, toiled upon for many hours, furnished from carpenters in years past in the great state of Maryland, land of our Great Queen Mary!; a beer sitting on the table, on a book on the table, sweltering, a Mexican beer!; More...

33 comments like (36 people liked it)

Jan 31, 2009

Rebecca rated it:

Love letter to Vita Sackville-West 'n' mock biography encompassing centuries. Kinda exposes realism as inadequate for portraying consciousness by defiantly claiming the inner world as the true history and stating multiple selves.
My fave Orlandos were the boy in love with the Russian Princess on the ice and the woman (he changes sex) adopted by gypsies.

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 03, 2010

Sarah rated it:

Vita Sackville-West's son may have called Orlando “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature”, but let me tell you: if someone wrote me a love letter like this, their ass would be getting dumped shortly thereafter.

This book was like the song that wouldn't end- it just goes on and on (yet it isn't particularly lengthy) without saying very much of interest. Despite the fact that reading it was a serious chore, for whatever reason I couldn't just give up and toss it asid More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 21, 2008

Ruth rated it:

Well, I started into this book with a really great attitude and interest. After a few chapters, my interest waned; but, I felt compelled to finish it since it was up for discussion by my reading group.

I just couldn't plow through it. There are too many other books calling my name like sirens on rocks and vying for my limited personal reading time.

So, I rented the movie and was glad that I viewed it v. reading. The cinematography was absolutely lovely and the costuming More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 16, 2007

Charles rated it:

I made a rather insulting, and uninformed, comment about English literature and Woolf in particular to a friend of mine who called me out as never having read her.
This book is my penance.
So far I'm finding her language irritating to say the least but will reserve judgment until the end.

THE END---

It's was almost impossible for me to finish this book. From the first sentence I was never at ease with her prose enough to enjoy anything she was doing with the stor More...

17 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 06, 2007

Cris rated it:

I could not put down Virginia Woolf's Orlando--simply and intoxicatingly brilliant, playful, and poetic! Written with the cheeky humor reminiscent of Chaucer and his The Canterbury Tales and diving into something akin to a Monty Python skit, Woolf's "biography" tells the story of a young, noble, Elizabethan-era man who moves progressively through time about four-hundred years (although only aging about twenty years), straight up until 1928, the year Woolf's novel was published. If th More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Aug 02, 2008

Lizzi rated it:

So there was a really rich nobleman in the 1500s who kissed the hand of a queen and she started to like him and he became really popular and snogged alot of women but there was ONE woman who was kind of a man? but anyway he snogged her on snowy riverbanks but she left (darnit) and broke his heart into little crying bits and he totally isolated himself to his house that spanned nine acres and after a few years he woke up one day and was a woman.

That's RIGHT.

And then he(she More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 09, 2011

Dan rated it:

Virginia Woolf without the stream of consciousness...well there were a couple of pages toward the end.

Many reviewers see this as a book about feminism or lesbianism. I saw, instead, a story about the struggle we each wage to embrace our dual natures and individually discover who we are meant to be. Sounds kind of heavy but Woolf makes the journey entertaining and often comical.

While this is not the stream of consciousness fare we find in others of Woolf's work, it is de More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 02, 2011

La Stamberga dei Lettori added it

Quando si legge di Orlando, ci si imbatte sempre nella stessa impressione. E' un romanzo altamente originale, unico nel suo genere, irripetibile. E' una biografia fantastica ed immaginaria, ispirata ad una donna amata dalla Woolf: è la più grande lettera d'amore sia mai stata scritta, è stato detto. Ma questi sono affari privati della scrittrice: ciò che rimane al lettore è la storia singolare di un uomo-donna-androgino che vive attraverso tre secoli, presentandosi così come una summa dell'esper More...

0 comments like

Jan 25, 2009

Ezra rated it:

This is a book that has stayed in my book shelf at home for a very long time. I would constantly pass by it hestitating reading those hard and difficudlt pages for me to comprehend. But finally, one day I took up the courage after a while from going to a show of Virginia Wolf. The book Orlando is about a rich clergy man who goes through unreceprocated love. After this event he goes into a depression cycle, then becoming a woman. Post becoming a woman Orlando starts to realize the events that wom More...

1 comment like

Feb 08, 2012

Kristine rated it:

What a charming book! I had tried to read To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf quite a few years ago and never made it beyond ten pages. So when my friend Sasha gave me a copy of this book and told me she was named after the Russian princess in this novel....well I had to read it. Well surprise, surprise! Not only could I read it (and understand it) but I absolutely loved it. It is clever and laugh out loud funny. It is too bad Orlando did not meet her "biographer" because in her ( More...

0 comments like

Feb 04, 2012

Mike rated it:

I do not understand this odd book. A man lives for 400 years aging very little, but becomes a woman overnight. OK. I think there is something like satire on the mores of the times that Orlando lived, but this is not concrete enough to call the book a satire. The most interesting thing to do with this concept is to explore how longevity takes a toll on the character, brings him/her closer to or farther from wisdom, brings profound changes that cannot accrue in a single lifetime but might over man More...

0 comments like

Nov 29, 2011

Webbnina rated it:

After forcing myself through the tortured, overly self-conscious sentences of "Mrs. Dalloway," I wasn't sure that I'd want to read more Woolf, but "Orlando" was in every sense a breath of fresh air. Where "Mrs. Dalloway" feels like A Book Written To Be Modernist, "Orlando," equal parts biography, love letter, and literary fable, is a joyful, funny, life-affirming story that is utterly unique.
The book follows the adventures of Orlando, a young noblem More...

0 comments like

Sep 25, 2011

Mary added it

"[Orlando] was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature. Many people of his time, still more of his rank, escaped the infection and were thus free to run or ride or make love at their own sweet will. But some were early infected by a germ said to be bred of the pollen of the asphodel and to be blown out of Greece and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the hand as it was raise to strike, cloud the eye as it sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it decl More...

0 comments like

Sep 21, 2011

Kenny rated it:

H. G. Wells attributed the success of his novels to the fun involved in imagining, 'what if?' What if "pigs could fly...? How would you feel and what might not happen to you if suddenly you were changed into an ass and couldn't tell anyone about it? Or if you became invisible? But no one would think twice about the answer if hedges and houses also began to fly, or if people changed into lions, tigers, cats and dogs left and right, or if everyone could vanish anyhow. Nothing remains interest More...

0 comments like

Sep 21, 2011

Tocotin rated it:

This is my first book by Virginia Woolf, and I've always wanted to read something of her, for many reasons. I liked some of it: the concept, the concise and funny descriptions of passing centuries, the style (although my attention did wander sometimes), and the authorial humor and asides. I think the spirit of Elizabethan England was conveyed very well, and laughed at the 19th century, but on the whole the book had overall a 18th century flavor, much like Voltaire's stories meant to illustrate s More...

0 comments like

Sep 11, 2011

Wan Ni rated it:

This is my first time reading a book by Virginia Woolf. I have previously tried to read Mrs Dalloway, but found it difficult to finish. Orlando read differently, and I really enjoyed it. The book is a biography of this person named Orlando. He grew up as a boy in a rich household that allows him to meet beautiful Russian princesses. He goes through Elizabethan England and finds himself on an adventure at sea. Later he wakes up in a gypsy commune in Turkey, as a woman. Female Orlando returns to V More...

0 comments like

Jan 29, 2011

Tancredi rated it:

Poi improvvisamente, Orlando ricadeva in uno dei suoi eccessi di malinconia, forse per la vista della vecchia che zoppicava sul ghiaccio, fors'anche senza ragione alcuna. Allora si gettava bocconi sul ghiaccio, scrutava l'acqua gelata e pensava alla morte.

E ha ben ragione il filosofo, il quale dice che lo spessore di una lama basta a separare la malinconia dalla gioia, e giunge al punto da opinare, del resto, che l'una sia gemella all'altra."

Commentare un romanzo di Virgina W More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2010

Shalaka rated it:

The blurb on this novel intrigued me enough to make me want to read it. The book is a fictional biography where Woolf is the biographer of a young upper-class man called Orlando. We watch as he floats through social circles and finds love in nature, poetry, dogs and women. Half way through the book, Orlando becomes female (it's not a spoiler - it reveals this in the blurb and Woolf doesn't make a huge show of it anyway).

Personally, I thought the book was much better in the second ha More...

0 comments like

May 16, 2009

Magda rated it:

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them --

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that.

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the man of mind.

the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as i More...

1 comment like

Jul 20, 2009

Tifnie rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

1 comment like

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