The Frame

By now, you should know, I’m a Virginia Woolf fangirl. I love the way she expresses things, her sense of humor, the beauty of her prose. Orlando is something of a departure, a very tongue-in-cheek imitation of a biography. As I said in the review of the film above, it’s about a 16th century nobleman who lives for at least the next three centuries, and somewhere along the way becomes a woman; and both of these incredible things are taken perfectly in stride by the narrator. The book is hilarious and innovative in its imitation of various writing styles, mostly the biography in general, but also writing techniques common in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Many people consider it a postmodern novel, a pastiche of former styles, for that reason, and I’m inclined to agree with them. I tend to find Woolf amusing in all her books, but in Orlando she really is just having fun, and a lot of it.
Superior