Greg S’s Reviews > Orlando > Status Update

“A toad set in emeralds! Harry the Archduke! Blue-bottles on the ceiling! (here another self came in). But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she was sunk in gloom: tears actually shaped themselves and she had long given over crying). Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.)”

“And now it was clear that there are only two ways of coming to a conclusion upon Victorian literature–one is to write it out in sixty volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of this one.”

“…toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop’s ship climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white crest with a thousand deaths in it arched over it;”

Cute. — “…added the words ‘Rattigan Glumphoboo’, which summed it up precisely.”

Good one, Woolf. — “Charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing;”

My biggest problem with this book is also what I like about it: these complex sentences that can stretch to twenty words or more. Also the pacing is nice, and almost like reading sheet music. But really there’s no plot. I’m almost page a hundred and I think only a few things have happened: the rise to dukedom, transformation, the return to London.

So many dependent clauses you forget what the subject was. — “Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now rose, like a dome of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or fancy, was so impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has seen a swarm of vibrant dragonflies alight, with apparent satisfaction, upon the glass bell which shelters some tender vegetable.”

“…being like a wave which returns to the deep body of the sea;”

“Obscurity is dark, ample, and free;”

“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own.”