Orlando

Title: Orlando
Author: Virginia Woolf
Published: 1928 originally, this edition 2004 by Vintage.
Genre: Biography
Pages: 215


One last book for 2012! Started with a classy note, ending in a similar way. Jolly good. *puffs on an imaginary pipe*

Born in the times of Queen Elizabeth -the one who lived 1533-1603, not the current one- Orlando is a young nobleman who, as the years and lovers pass, doesn't seem to age. He is a beautiful man, a dreamer and a poet, and thanks to his noble birth, when his heart is broken in England, he takes off to Turkey, to become an ambassador, only to return home years later, as a woman.

Turkey might be an interesting holiday destination...

Anyhoo. One could go on about how Virginia based Orlando on her lover, Vita Sackville-Baggins West, and all the gender issues which are really interesting to read about, frankly, from the point of view of someone in whose times these things, differences between men and women and their strict roles, were such a bloody big issue. And to see them through someone who has lived both sides of the coin. At times the writing felt long-winded and there were moments when I wanted to slap Orlando a little, but I enjoyed the whole ride. Woolf's tone was very humorous at points, and she can write rambling sentences like a boss.


Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon; Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer "Yes"; if we are truthful we say "No"; nature, who has so so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by provding not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends with us-a piece of a policeman's trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra's wedding veil-but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread.

And that's when I kinda fell in love with Virginia Woolf a little. I think I'm going to re-watch the movie made of Orlando now that the book is still in somewhat fresh memory, although that one sentence, and writing it out, has pretty much killed what was left of my brain after the christmas holidays and all the sweets, oh the bloody sweets! I remember liking it, the movie, the first time I saw it, and what's there not to like? Orlandy os played by Tilda Swinton! rowr.

So, bye bye 2012! Thank you for reading, and, umm, let's be careful out there!