a book
Orlando
Virginia Woolf · 2012 · 267 pages
Orlando is destined to live for four hundred years . . .
During the Elizabethan era, the young courtier Orlando becomes a lover to the aging Queen and embarks on an intense affair with the beautiful Russian Princess Sasha. Yet while Orlando can fulfil most of his desires, he never quite seems to fit in.
Then one night, Orlando falls into a deep sleep and awakes transformed, emerging as a woman in eighteenth-century London.
Orlando must now inhabit a very different life, dealing with matters of dress, sex and marriage. But will she arrive in the twentieth century as an individual who has, at last, forged a place in society for herself?
recommended by 6 people
sourced from public statements
Elif Shafak
“I was a student when I read Orlando for the first time, and I remember how for many days afterwards I walked around in a happy daze. Daring to transcend boundaries of gender, class, history, culture, geography…. this is a story—Woolf called it a biography—like no other. Our hero wakes up and finds himself turned into a woman, and delightfully, this transition takes place in Istanbul—Constantinople. Orlando is a novel about transformations and journeys—from man into woman, from the West to the East, from one existence to the next and vice versa.”↗
Tilda Swinton
“Like Orlando, I wrote poetry. In my adolescent fantasy I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future. For me, this trifle of phantasmagoria has always been a practical manual. A tourist guide to human experience, the best of wise companions. At least, it was my first: a message in a bottle from an imaginary friend.”↗
Barbara Kingsolver
“What she did with this character who begins as a man and becomes a woman, and passes in both directions actually for the remainder of their 300 year life, was so amazing. And it was was surreal. But it was also realistic. When you read that book, it doesn’t read like science fiction or alternative fiction, it reads as realism.”↗
Jeanette Winterson
“It begins, ‘He, for their could be no doubt about his sex…’ and then we spend the rest of this gorgeous rollicking novel entirely in doubt about his sex. A love-letter to language, a time traveling duel with duality.”↗
