Orlando, a man who turned into woman and lived three hundred years, is a legend. So is Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf entered my life around three years ago. I met her through a passage from the book Three Guineas, which had already come out as an SAT passage. A teacher analyzed the passage and explained its purpose, but I could not understand the deeper meaning of her words. New phrases and analogies circled around my head and presented a wall preventing me from entering the world of Woolf. After that moment of obscurity, I met Woolf's writing briefly in a numbered encounters. However, I was able to dive back into the journey of searching for Virginia Woolf through Orlando.
Orlando, to sum its story, is a generous book. The main character, Orlando, passes through so many doors of themself (I will not specify pronouns) as they grow, and at they end, they combine. The book starts with the main character named Orlando as a young boy, innocent, full of dreams, and a desire of writing. Throughout the story, this boy turns into a man, and then a woman, while experiencing many moments of love, confusion, and just existence in a span of three hundred years. Yet, even through all these changes and shifts in life, the one constant thing in her life is her writing. Her long poem called The Oak Tree is constantly present in Orlando's journey of centuries. She writes down her perspectives and changes through time, and the poem grows like an oak tree.
Woolf encapsulates all these moments in poetic descriptions that often obscure the meaning that I want to find. Yet, I am able to appreciate the beauty that Woolf gives to the readers through Orlando. The emotions flow in and out like yarn woven together into a piece and create a dizzying feeling. I do not understand how Woolf was able to write such words and, more, what Woolf wants to convey, but makes my journey in searching for Woolf more beautiful.
I recommend this book to those who enjoy prose. It is definitely a struggle and not one of the easiest books to read, so I do not recommend this book to very young readers. Still, to me, Orlando is one of those books where one can read multiple times and see a reflection of themselves change, like Orlando has.
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