Orlando by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s so interesting to read Virginia Woolf in the 21st century, especially as someone who was born in the 1980s. Woolf was also born in the ’80s… the 1880s… and reached adulthood at the dawn of a new century, a new era where the world’s social and technological changes seemed staggering and impossible to reverse. I feel a kinship with her; I’ve seen my own new century turn over into an unrecognizable present, and like Woolf, I believe that it has brought with it new ways of thinking and being that will require new expression to capture. The way Woolf re-imagined language to reflect a tempestuous and expansive inner world remains shocking and boundary-pushing, even today. I love how courageously extravagant, personal, and surreal her writing is, and while it seems like the central purpose of this work was largely self-serving, in the process she created something so entirely strange and resonant that there was no going back once this book entered the world. A person’s mind and heart can be so much more fluid and unpredictable than what fits inside the strict bounds of Victorian literature. With her modernist Orlando, Woolf gave one of the strongest, most enduring kicks to the walls. She wrote about identity and art with a stylistic confidence that, just like Orlando herself, remains ever-changing and vital as the centuries keep ticking by.
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