Modern Classics Orlando a Biography (Penguin Modern Classics)

This is a strange book. I don't think I have ever read anything quite like it. The conceit is that it is the biography of an aristocratic person who wants to be a writer and who was born a man but transforms into a woman. And who lives about 400 years. Despite this, it is rather short - 242 pages in my edition. Woolf has her typical breezy style - never spending a ton of time on details of action or setting, but flitting from scene to scene and remark to remark only to then spend a page or more dwelling on the mental state of a character or on a somewhat digressive riff on a theme suggested by the plot. In this case, she spends a lot of time talking about how the details of the external world in each era that Orlando inhabits influence his/her mind and approach to writing and gender expression. Woolf's prose is utterly dazzling - sometimes a bit too literally actually dazzling you, which is to say interrupting your understanding of what she is saying. She has a habit of deferring the subject or object of a given clause until very very late in a series of comma phrases. None of the individual parts are difficult to understand, but in order to really get what she is saying with some sentences you have to go back and re-read them in light of what you now know is the noun that all of those subordinate clauses were modifying. The novel is also sometimes obscure purely by virtue of describing things from another era - footnotes help, although plenty of the time you don't gain that much by using them. The book is also very funny in some places - mostly so when poking fun at the art critics and prevailing wisdom of each era. There were also a few times I could tell an extended joke was being told that seemed to be intended solely for her friends, especially for Vita Sackville West, on whom Orlando is largely based. Most of the time though I think you are better off just reading through and only slowing down when you can tell Woolf is trying to communicate something important, and just not worrying too much about decoding every reference. I also recommend just plowing through the first chapter and not dwelling too much on it. It is different from the rest of the book because it is much more similar to a typical plot of a novel, and the book only rarely returns to that mode later. In my case, I found the book became way more interesting as soon as it was done with.