Orlando

Before the veiled and scattered lights of Saint Brieuc and the sea farther off - bad Woolf syntax parody sic and  intended - I began reading Orlando this evening, the only book by Woolf I've never read.

This is due to an adolescent obsession. This omission was, at least consciously, unplanned.

But it is revelatory. I realise I had relegated Woolf to the status of an early-age engouement, to a precious if ridiculously overly researched  undergraduate paper on Walter Pater's influence on a Decadent axiology of taste (or something...)

I have intense memories of that paper - of the emotion accompanying its composition, not its content - as well as of all my initial adolescent forays into novel-writing, which read like 300 page long Woolf pastiches, full of islands and salt winds, men gazing out to sea in the brunt of salt winds, attics, empty rooms in old vaguely patrician manors (which I had never seen, and still have not), and the sea...

(To those reading this now who hate Woolf with a passion, who find her convoluted, pretentious, vague, excessively and heroically bourgeoise, half-baked, at once sentimental and weirdly cold... I understand. There are few novelists for me more divisive, more taste-reliant, than her, and though I half admit each and every one of these aspects, I love her books with an undying passion).

And so reading Orlando now, after 8 or so years without having touched a book by Woolf, well, the boy comes surging back... How beautiful it is! And how bizarre! Have just traced the pages of the mythical Great Frost, where country boys are weirdly frozen in mid-action throwing stones at frozen and still crows... In its aspect of repressed fantastique, there is a certain magic realism here so much lighter, less winking and irritatingly self-conscious than Marquez...

And its infinitely complex sexuality! Sensuality rather. Both. With the morphing and reshapings of gender, such terms as homosexuality become extraordinarily reductive, unable to describe the synesthaesic interplay of these polyvalent bodies: when Orlando first glimpses Sasha skating so gracefully on the ice, for instance, and is distressed at falling in love with a boy, as only a boy could skate with such gracefulness (we are told), and then the revelation of her femininity, which allows Orlando (socially speaking) to desire her, to fall in love, but which seems  also almost a let-down to him, as if Sasha's initial apparent masculinity had been the pinion of a machinic desire which, though lessened by her female reality, required this reality as its cultural cachet, as the thing allowing the kisses to occur... Thus her femininity required the initial "incorrect" impression of masculinity for her femininity to emerge as an infinitely powerful sexual construct...)

And I haven't even got to the point of the "true" gender change (or so I remember from some half-forgotten articles and the book's back cover which I glimpsed).

Orlando seems at once deeply woolfian and utterly unwoolfian.

I did not know Woolf could do this. All of this. The fantastique and the morphing corporal realities and  the sex! The goddamn sexiness of the whole thing: all violet ice and blue lace, and the tree roots hard against a shoulder like "the spine of the earth", and a sexiness overcoming hetero and homo divides, into a sex of the earth almost, of infused life living through its own, constantly transformative, desire ...  

I am only 40 pages in.

I will be leaving Orlando in Saint Brieuc, by the sea, taking different books on the train back to Paris. It will be right to read it here on a small and often desolate coast, in a smallish town, in an attempt later to find windy attics and men struggling fiercely against cold Atlantic gales towards an almost invisible island, far off...