A review by nohoperadio
Orlando by Virginia Woolf

5.0

Okay, obviously I was always going to love this, no surprises here, except actually it’s still like a thousand times more interesting than its reputation. 

I’m a lover of Woolf’s somewhat neglected first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day which both already have the full weight of her intelligence in them but come before her ambition to write in never-before-attempted forms emerged with Jacob’s Room (or possibly with the Monday or Tuesday stories? which I’ve not yet read). I admire both Jacob’s Room and The Waves, but I also find them frustrating because Woolf is so much better than anybody else at the novelist’s humbler duties, at simply observing life and recording it in elegant sentences, that the formal innovation often feels like a distraction from that. 
 

Orlando feels like the best of all worlds: here, the content is so wild that it takes the pressure off the style. This is (of the ones I've read so far) the mature-period book where Woolf is most comfortable being merely the greatest writer in the English language, and not on any kind of search for something bigger than writing.

As for that wild content, well, this is her Weird Gender Stuff novel obviously, we all know that. And yes it is, but what people don’t talk about so much is that it’s also her Everything novel. This is a historical novel that covers five centuries of English history, which is also a künstlerroman about a young poet finding their way, which is also… there’s like a whole interior decorating interlude at one point? The funniest thing about the world’s most famous Weird Gender Stuff novel is that you could remove all the weird gender stuff from it completely and it would still be completely unique and better than anything you or I or anyone else could even vaguely conceive of ever creating.