Amazon.com Review
Among the many imaginative works sparked by the life and writings of Virginia Woolf,
Orlanda may be the first to offer its own compelling narrative voice rather than succumbing, like a drunken bee, to the seductive rhythms of Woolf's prose and the sway of her metaphors. Even readers who relished Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
The Hours, for example, must have been aware of how closely it followed and evoked
Mrs. Dalloway. The narrator of
Orlanda, on the other hand, isn't even certain she entirely likes Woolf's writing.
A novelist with graying hair, whom we are invited to identify with Jacqueline Harpman herself, she reports with wonder, amusement, and occasional condescension on the strange transformation experienced by the main character, a Belgian professor named Aline Berger, whose suppressed tomboy half splits off from her in a café off the Gard du Nord and inhabits the body of a 20-year-old man. The narrator dubs this new creature "Orlanda," hoping the name will be taken as "the humble tribute of an admirer and not the vulgar plagiarism of somebody devoid of imagination." Watching Orlanda glory in his newfound physical freedom, indulging in athletic sex, huge meals, and odd fits of housecleaning, might seem more enjoyable for a reader than tracking Aline through her mild-mannered days, but it is Aline who gains the most by this gradual recognition of her divided self and her attempts to bridge the gulf.
Woolf's lyrical, fantastic novel Orlando, which Aline has been reluctantly rereading for a class she must teach, proves to be the starting point for her self-awareness, as she realizes that it is not about the sexually ambiguous Vita Sackville-West, as literary historians would have it, but about the young Virginia Woolf--a "boy," with all the liberties of boyhood, who at puberty had to become a girl. Struck by her idea, Aline "was ecstatic: Childhood is when the years pass and you don't grow any older!... She was breathless with emotion." The narrator steps back with fresh admiration: "I watch her. She is in her element. She is no longer the dejected woman at the station, nor the amputee walking listlessly beside [her boyfriend] Albert. Her pen races over the white page, tracing the graceful arabesques of thought." --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
A twisting, teasing exploration of sexuality, inner motives and desires, this new work by Belgian novelist and psychoanalyst Harpman (I Who Have Never Known Men), winner of the Prix M?dicis, fugues on a body-switching theme in limpid, postmodern prose. On a springtime Friday afternoon in Paris, Aline Berger, a 35-year-old professor of literature, waits for her train home to Brussels, thumbing impatiently through Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Then, abruptly, Orlanda materializes. Called forth by some literary magic, she is Aline's exuberant and adventurous alter ego, born of Aline's 12-year-old tomboy spirit. Fettered far too long by the adult Aline's demure propriety, Orlanda spots a receptive external host in Lucien Lefr?ne, a luscious, faintly unsavory, blond 20-year-old youth sitting quietly nearby. Thus begins a labyrinthine ride along converging and diverging paths of sexual and personal identity. Aline and Lucien return to their respective homes and partners in Brussels, but with Orlanda on the loose, life cannot continue as usual. Embodying Orlanda's unleashed appetite for freedom and sex, Lucien sheds responsibilities to family and friends and seeks new excitement with older, wealthy male lovers. While Orlanda gleefully cavorts in Lucien's body, Aline subconsciously senses that something is amiss. It is only when Orlanda/Lucien comes to find her that she understands what has been expunged from her personality. Like lost lovers, Orlanda and Aline are physically separated but emotionally intertwined, each needing the other to survive. Their fumbling progress back toward each other culminates in a disappointingly predictable clash between the double personalities. Still, drawing on wide-ranging literary references from Tristan und Isolde to Proust, Harpman cleverly manipulates an elusive narrative "I" and shifting perspectives in cool, insouciant, yet seductive style, to attack the well-worn existentialist query, "Who am I?" (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
