Review: Orlando

Orlando by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm afraid that my review of Orlando might sound like I hated Orlando, so I want to say up front that I didn't hate it and talk about the stuff that I liked. It was a delightfully whimsical read, and I was surprised at how contemporary it felt, in certain ways. Woolf was did a lot of interesting things with perspective and mildly fantastical elements. I'm also really excited about the nuanced exploration of gender and love and romance. There were also moments that were dense and wordy, but poetic and rewarding.

But really 'moments' are all there were. There is no plot at all, simply a continuous description of incidents and thoughts of the title character. I guess that's to be expected from a faux-biography, but I wish it had built more, or had a more conflict to get invested in. And not every book has to be a page-turning plot-driven quest. I just found myself wondering where it was going and if anything would ever have consequences.

I'll also say that this book would have been a lot more rewarding as part of a course, because it's hard to tell whether a given turn of phrase or strange occurrence was supposed to reference something literary or historical, or if it was some detail about Vita's life or inside joke between Vita and Virginia. I'd like to read something a little more traditional from Woolf to see how this compares.

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