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Business Stationary Mart - Orlando: A Biography (Oxford World's Classics)
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List Price: $3.99
Our Price: $3.94
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Manufacturer: Oxford Univ Pr on Demand
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780192834737
ISBN: 0192834738
Label: Oxford Univ Pr on Demand
Manufacturer: Oxford Univ Pr on Demand
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2000-04
Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr on Demand
Studio: Oxford Univ Pr on Demand
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Dalliance Written on Light and Air
Comment: By far Virginia Woolf's most lighthearted and appealing book. But it is also by far her most profound meditation on reading and writing, identity and art, history and time.
Strictly speaking "Orlando" is a pseudo literary biography that mocks literary biography (and representation in general). In place of a person Woolf creates a fantastic hybrid and the metamorphoses that occurs simply underlines the unreality, the utterly fabricated nature, of her creation and of all writerly creations. But its also much more than that for Orlando allows Woolf the opportunity to comment on one of her own creations as she is creating it. The writer transforms the world with her words but she is also transformed by the words that she uses. In this way one can view reading and writing as ongoing metamorphoses.
No other book in existence so proudly announces what it is not: real. No other book calls attention to the fact that it is merely literature--a figment of a writers fancy-- in such a graceful way. And yet few books have the imaginative power to so transform the readers who encounter it as this one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: 4.5 out of 5: Sexuality through the ages
Comment: The story begins with Orlando as a passionate young nobleman in Queen Elizabeth's court. By the end, Orlando is a 36-year-old woman three centuries later. Orlando witnesses the making of history from its edge. A close examination of the nature of sexuality and the changing climate of the passing centuries. Very novel and engaging if a bit loose-ended at times.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Milord! Milady!
Comment: This `roman à clés' is very original. The hero continues to live in different historical periods and undergoes a sex change.
However, it is written in an emotional, sentimental, superlative style: `society in the reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled brilliance. The graces were supreme.'
Except for the first period, there are no conflicts, only rather superficial descriptions of the mood and spirits of the times. For V. Woolf, `to give a truthful account of society ... only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets and novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the causes where the truth does not exist.'
`Orlando' is a perfect flight from reality: `But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.' `Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party ... should be left to the historian.'
This book is a clean, introvert, aristocratic, long ode to pure Beauty.
Only for Virginia Woolf fans.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This Book is Still Hip -- Hard to Believe Written and Published in 1928 Edwardian England [63]
Comment: Written in 1928, this book clearly sought to shock the reading public. For every repression delivered by Victorian authorities which surely hampered Woolf's freedoms, this book delivers a defiant rebuke to the same.
Orlando - it states in the beginning - is a man for whom "there can be no doubt of his sex." He is rich, handsome and lives a life even Hugh Hefner may be jealous of. But, scandals lead him to isolation, to public ridicule or upbraiding, which led him to sequester himself to his 200-bedroom hermitage-castle. In his hermit's existence, he does not pass time philandering, but instead pulls books off the library's shelves and romanticizes with fiction.
Eventually tedium compels Orlando to ask his friendly king to deliver him overseas where he can perform the duties of ambassador. He ends up in then Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. While living there, he ends one exhaustingly long night of debauchery and partying with a seven day sleep - and awakes a woman.
This was a "good thing." As a man, he could not appreciate Tennyson, Shakespeare, Byron and the like. As a woman, their written word touched her greatly. She could be red eyed, she could be lachrymose. As a man, he never loved. Wollf says, ". . . love - as the male novelists define it . . . has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity or poetry. . ." Orlando the man had no love? Maybe, with Sasha (a Russian seductress) - but maybe Sasha ruined him so that he could never love again.
As a woman, Orlando knows love. Wolff explains, "Love is slipping off one's petticoat and - "
Can you imagine the Victorians reading that?!
Orlando's life continues not for decades, but centuries. And, some other characters do as well. "The true length of a person's life . . . is always a matter of dispute. Indeed, it is a difficult business - this time-keeping thing. . . " Indeed, it was for Wolff who quite intentionally delivers this novel as a time-challenged writer.
More obscurities arise - androgynous lovers, angels' visits, children born from or for Orlando - and splendor with these very biologically-defying events.
This is not written in the weaving masterful language which Woolf delivers in "To the Lighthouse" or "Mrs.Dalloway." Instead, here the schizophrenia lies with the main character, not the writing style. Probably, a better story than "Lighthouse" or "Dalloway", but I am partial to the writing style of those masterpieces.
In any event, anyone wondering just how throttled Woolf felt in the stifling moral norms of her country, read this book. If anyone wants a bizarre tale about a bizarre man/woman, this is a must read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: As Only Virginia Woolf Could Write
Comment: I like to think myself a very well-rounded reader (I have my degree in English), but I don't know if the genius of Virginia Woolf was just beyond me in Orlando. I enjoyed the story and the various historical characters that made appearances throughout, but something about it went a bit over my head. It was a strange tale of adventure and romance, with Orlando seeking the beauties of life and poetry throughout the centuries.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Virginia Woolf's exuberant `biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the `life' that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. In this novel, Virginia Woolf plays loose and fast: Orlando uncovers a literary and sexual revolution overnight.
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