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reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Harpman wrote the infamous I Who Have Never Known Men (one of my favourite books), and so when I saw this one sitting on a bookshop table, I knew it had to be my next read.
However, this is nothing like that dystopian novel.
Harpman was, I found out, a psychoanalyst. This novel screams Freud and psychoanalysis.
It follows a literary professor named Aline, whose consciousness splits off and forms a young man named Orlanda. It’s a psychoanalytical exploration of a woman grappling with the repressed sides of the soul.
The title of this novel clearly references Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I do not like Woolf, and I did not like Orlanda — ergo, I think it should have been clear I wouldn’t really enjoy this book.
And yet, while I didn’t enjoy the novel, I found Harpman’s interpretation of Woolf’s ambiguous text interesting.
In Woolf’s novel, the titular character starts as male and then becomes female—the opposite of Harpman’s. But in Orlanda, Aline is studying Woolf’s text and wonders if it’s a novel about puberty. About Orlando never wanting to grow up, to lose the freedom a young girl once had. It’s an interesting interpretation, and one I hadn’t considered before.
This is a novel on the effect of the psyche on girls who have to grow up and repress certain parts of themselves. To me it reads less like a novel and more like a creative essay and conversation to Woolf and Harpman’s psycho-analytical contemporaries. Interesting but jaunty to read.
I do wonder that given the complexity of the psychology, how much of the true meaning has been lost on the translation to English?