Orlando in On Paths Unknown

Jul 08, 2013 Dolors rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2016

Orlando might have been devised as a mere divertimento, as a playful attempt to challenge the established views on sexuality or as a fantastical tale to confront the history of East and West by questioning the boundaries of space and time, but to this reader this novella meant much more. It meant a universe of fluctuating moods, characters and sweeping poetry that gives reason to be through the act of reading.

How to describe the nuanced melody of finely threaded irony prodigiously in tune with t Orlando might have been devised as a mere divertimento, as a playful attempt to challenge the established views on sexuality or as a fantastical tale to confront the history of East and West by questioning the boundaries of space and time, but to this reader this novella meant much more. It meant a universe of fluctuating moods, characters and sweeping poetry that gives reason to be through the act of reading.

How to describe the nuanced melody of finely threaded irony prodigiously in tune with the most sophisticated sense of humor that entertains and prickles and urges to see the world without the limiting lenses of gender, class or social convention?
One can evolve unhindered when he suspends judgement and allows the flow of writing to give way to a solid account that sparkles because undeniable reality is better understood through the theatrical fiction of its form.

How to account for centuries expanding and contracting beyond human comprehension, decades that amount to the fall of a rose leaf on the ground, years that disappear in a flash?
The passage of time is of no consequence when love for the written word equals the all-consuming passion for the person who knows us best regardless of clothing or hair style, manners or social rituals that distract us from the true essence of our beings.

How to explain the ache spanning countless generations, eras and customs that is nestled in the heart of the artist who relishes the young, supple body, pure as driven snow; the fleeting grass under a blanket of blue or the stars reflected in pools of stagnant water both in London and Turkey?
Emily Dickinson says in her poem #466:
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise -

For Occupation – Writing –
Orlando claims a “room of her own” to write her life, a task that will also define her love, and infuse wholeness into the swelling tides that toss her multiple beings, her male and female groundings.
The result, be it an experimental biography, an unorthodox love declaration or a thought-provoking roman à clef to defy categorization at all levels, goes beyond its original purpose and becomes a fluid, ever-changing tapestry of voices answering other voices, speaking the universal language of poetry.
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Mar 16, 2015 BrokenTune rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reviewed, the-edwardians

"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 "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) ...more

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Feb 03, 2012 Xandra rated it really liked it

Shelves: british, 1001-books, gender, 1900-1949, woolf-and-joyce, z-w, lgbtq, european, surreal-fantasy-magic

Are you telling me there are people who write playful, gender-bending, historical satires in which their lover is the multifaceted, time-defying main character, with pictures to prove it? Next year I better not get flowers for my birthday.

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Apr 02, 2013 Momina rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy-magical-realism, 500-must-reads

Yummy, charming, sensuous, delightful! A marvelous account of a character so ardently probed, explored, loved, worshiped – she tosses him into seas, then pulls her out, shakes her, ruffles her, unearths her pearls, his disillusionments, her epiphanies, his loves, and her desires. No wonder this book is called one of the most charming love-letters ever to be written; there is such sincerity on the part of Woolf and such craft that Orlando lives and so vividly in all his manifestations and apparit ...more

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