Virginia Woolf, 1928
the sixty-first book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Marion James
I’m not yet returning to the visitor recommendation series in any kind of sustained way, but I needed an audiobook to listen to on my most recent drive back home from Portland, and several recordings of this were easy to find. (I went with the one by Cori Samuel, whose reading was superb.) I knew a tiny bit about this already: namely, that it was by Virginia Woolf, and that it was about a title character who shapeshifts back and forth between male and female. Except some of that is wrong. Orlando does not shapeshift back and forth, but only once (male to female), and does not do so deliberately. Also, the book isn’t actually about that. I’m sure countless theses and dissertations have been written about sexuality in this book, but I was struck by just how incidental the sex change is. Far more central to the work is another bit of magic that everyone in the book takes in stride: the fact that Orlando, along with a number of other characters, lives for around 350 years and in that time ages from sixteen to thirty-six.
So what happens? Well, not a lot, really. When the book starts out, sounding less like a novel from 1928 and more like an episodic satire like those of a century or two earlier, the ratio of commentary and reflection on things that have happened to things actually happening feels like it’s somewhere in the area of 80 : 20. By the end, it has very gradually turned into a standard Virginia Woolf stream-of-consciousness novel, and that ratio is more like 95 : 5. A fair amount of the commentary is in fact commentary on the fact that so little is happening. The plot, to the extent that there is one, is essentially a framework on which Woolf can hang thoughts on the nature of life, and also on such topics as cultural trends and the world of literature. Orlando is a poet, which seems like it would threaten to make the book run afoul of Pattern 43 (it gets tiresome to read books about writing), except it’s actually worse, because the relevant passages generally aren’t even about writing itself but rather about literary scenes, literary movements, the publication process, the critical establishment, etc., etc. And, I mean, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for her depth of thought and ability to craft prose. If you want to read a few hundred pages of her ruminations on life, the universe, and everything, leavened with some humor, you might well be into this. If you’re looking for a story, perhaps look elsewhere.
(By the way, it turns out that apparently the title character of Orlando was modeled after Woolf’s longtime lover Vita Sackville-West. I suppose it says something that after paring down my library a few times I no longer own any books by Virginia Woolf, but Vita Sackville-West? I do still own one of hers.)
The Boundless Sea
David Abulafia, 2019
This is the audiobook I’d been listening to since my previous drive to and from Portland. I got it at the same time I got Abulafia’s previous book, The Great Sea. That was a history of seafaring in the Mediterranean. This is a history of seafaring in the oceans. It was pretty interesting! I will probably retain about 1% of the details Abulafia sets out, but my big takeaway was just how much of history revolves around establishing, maintaining, and protecting trade routes, and how so many of those trade routes involve luxuries. Like, people develop a taste for hot water in which leaves from the other side of the world have been soaking, and as a result, fleets are commissioned, wars are fought, empires rise and fall. (It’s especially bizarre when you personally find that the leaves make the water worse.) Or imagine that you are violently seized in a raid on your village in West Africa, sold into slavery, packed Tetris-style into the hull of a ship for three months, unable to sit up and barely able to breathe, and end up on a plantation in South Carolina where you spend the brief remainder of your miserable existence working yourself to exhaustion, spending day after day in a steeping tank stirring putrefying indigo plants around as a revolting stench rises up that puts the livestock to flight. Why is this your fate? Because some rich people want their clothes to be blue. There’s a lot of controversy these days over the extent to which our history curricula should delve into imperialism and slavery, but even when such subjects take center stage, I have found that very rarely do classes emphasize the banality of the why.
The Man in the High Castle (season 3)
Philip K. Dick and Frank Spotnitz, 2018
The pace felt like it slowed down a fair bit this season; by this point the show has spun out enough plot threads that all the cutting back and forth means we only inch along any one of them. And then for the main story arc of this season to only be halfway done by the end of it? It feels like one of those final movies in a series that gets split into two halves because you can’t get people to sit in a theater for five hours. And I feel like I need to see the second half before I can really comment on any of this.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |