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3.84 AVERAGE
3.84 AVERAGE
non mi sento di dare recensione o assegnare stelline perché i miei neuroni hanno iniziato a picchiarsi superata la metà del libro. gli autori che usano il flusso di coscienza ed io non andiamo ancora troppo d’accordo, a quanto pare.
però posso dire che la prima metà di libro, quella in cui ancora non avevo perso il filo, mi è piaciuta.
perdonami mia adorata virginia, i have failed you
però posso dire che la prima metà di libro, quella in cui ancora non avevo perso il filo, mi è piaciuta.
perdonami mia adorata virginia, i have failed you
challenging
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Oh I have so many feelings! It was, on occasion, laugh-out-loud funny, but also included so much of Woolf's deep thoughtfulness that I loved in To the Lighthouse. It feels very queer and, as Machado notes in the introduction of this copy, done in such a smart way for the time. Also noted by Machado, the deeply casual racism at the start of the book is hard to read. However, other than that section, I had a great time! The fact that Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse and Orlando in a two-year period is absolutely bananas to me.
You know when you're about to marry someone, but they have white eyelashes and can't bear the side of blood and so you're like nah? Orlando does, apparently.
Quotes I liked:
You know when you're about to marry someone, but they have white eyelashes and can't bear the side of blood and so you're like nah? Orlando does, apparently.
Quotes I liked:
Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady in green walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind her; sights exalted him - the birds and the trees: and made him in love with death - the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain - which was a roomy one - all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests.
The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was enor-mous. Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road. The fields were full of shep-herds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed, upon the hedge within a yard of him. The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of petrifaction sometimes ensued; and it was commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for there was none, but to the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had been turned literally to stone where they stood. The Church could give little help in the matter, and though some landowners had these relics blessed, the most part preferred to use them either as landmarks, scratching posts for sheep, or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking troughs for cattle, which purposes they serve, admirably for the most part, to this day.
Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us.
"I am growing up," she thought, taking her taper. "I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones," and she paced down the long gallery to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a troublesome. But it was interesting, amazingly, she thought, stretching her legs out to her log fire (for no sailor was present), and she reviewed, as if it were an avenue of great edifices, the progress of her own self along her own past.
"If this is love," said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on the other side of the fender, and now from the woman's point of view, "there is something highly ridiculous about it."
That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that women should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence, and so, shocked she was.
A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life - (and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).
Under this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense, and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to make its way into every house - damp, which is the most insidious of all enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone. So gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest of drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work.
It was not Orlando, who spoke, but the spirit of the age. But whichever it was, nobody answered it.
"Madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!"
"I'm dead, sir!" she replied.
She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage?
If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.
At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction, Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to the window, and exclaimed, "Done!" She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
"And if I were dead, it would be just the same!" she exclaimed.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism
Minor: Racial slurs
Stranger and more fabulous than I'd ever imagined... as I read it, I kept finding myself wondering if there was really any other book worth reading.
It wasn’t until a twist a little ways into the story that this novel really caught my attention. At that point, the novel begins to brilliantly analyse and expose the behavioural rules imposed on women, and the way women internalise these social restrictions. From a woman’s perspective, Woolf manages to cleverly shed light on the position men tend to take as well, showing with scornful ridicule the small-mindedness, nonsensicality, greed, and fragility of patriarchal systems (#masculinitysofragile), their denial of equal rights and agency to those who are not straight, cisgendered males, and how this remains more or less the same despite developments in technology and the arts. Gender transition and gender non-conformity, by the way, are dealt with by narrator and characters alike as a complete non-issue (as they should be). Woolf also comments on the emptiness of convention and of fashion, and accomplishes all of the above by following the protagonist’s investigations of their own perspective. Not consistently captivating, but definitely an innovative, poetic, and imaginative critique of social norms.
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
lighthearted
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
slow-paced
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated