Scan barcode
A review by abbeysullivan96
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
3.0
I wish we could do half stars on here. I LOVE Virginia Woolf as a literary and historical figure. I think she's one of the coolest people to ever live. I am always disappointed (in myself) when I can't quite get into her writing. Every time I pick up a Woolf book I struggle to finish it. I've accepted it as a flaw in my own character.
When I first started reading Orlando, I was flying through. The first half of the book I found exciting, entrancing, and deeply compelling. A book from 1928 about a person who switches genders and falls in love with both men and women. It's so cool! In just about 300 pages it traverses centuries of starkly varied British life in a way that feels really vivid. Not only that, it's a pretty thinly veiled love letter to Vita.
I can't pinpoint exactly where it happened, but at some point I started slowing down, only being able to really read a few pages at a time to truly understand what was happening. The timeline of everything became more muddied - and Orlando's life experiences more mundane as she settles into an increasingly "modern" British society that restricts women's freedoms. Maybe that's the whole point. I don't know, I'll have to read some spark notes after I sit with this for a little bit. I'm not above it!
Some favorite quotes:
"he felt the need of something he could attach his floating heart to"
"Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy - a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed"
"Then, suddenly Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy"
"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?"
When I first started reading Orlando, I was flying through. The first half of the book I found exciting, entrancing, and deeply compelling. A book from 1928 about a person who switches genders and falls in love with both men and women. It's so cool! In just about 300 pages it traverses centuries of starkly varied British life in a way that feels really vivid. Not only that, it's a pretty thinly veiled love letter to Vita.
I can't pinpoint exactly where it happened, but at some point I started slowing down, only being able to really read a few pages at a time to truly understand what was happening. The timeline of everything became more muddied - and Orlando's life experiences more mundane as she settles into an increasingly "modern" British society that restricts women's freedoms. Maybe that's the whole point. I don't know, I'll have to read some spark notes after I sit with this for a little bit. I'm not above it!
Some favorite quotes:
"he felt the need of something he could attach his floating heart to"
"Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy - a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed"
"Then, suddenly Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy"
"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?"