Orlando

Author's name: Virginia Woolf

It is the story of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia's lover from 1925 to 1928. She was a bohemian, aristocratic, bisexual novelist, so much so that there is a phrase that sums up the novel, spoken by Sackville's son, as "the longest and most enchanting love letter in literature." It is difficult to describe such a novel in a few lines, but it can be said that it spans a long period of time, some six hundred years. It is the story of Orlando, a seemingly immortal human being, born male, child, boy, and young man. He was one of the most beautiful young men of that era, so much so that the queen lost her temper in his presence and took him as her young lover. Love pains him and tears his heart, so he isolates himself for a long time before suddenly transforming into a beautiful young woman. His entire life changes, and Orlando goes off on a wild journey, trying everything: writing, publishing, living with gypsies, wearing dresses and trousers, and riding ships, horses, and cars. Her long life, spanning the ages and at only thirty-five years old, sways intelligently on the wings of modern systems and inventions while managing her estate, loving, being enamored, and preparing herself for a happy marriage. The discussion here is not about women, feminism, or questions of sexual and gender identity, although the novel is replete with these questions. These may seem classic to Western society, but we still need to address them in our Arab culture, due to the strange laws of time, about which Woolf says in this novel: "Unfortunately, time, despite its influence on animals and plants that bloom or wither, does not have the same power over the human mind. The human mind is a strange thing, and in turn affects the body of time. An hour, once inhabited by the enigmatic human soul, may become fifty or a hundred times longer, and the same hour may pass over the human mind as a single second." These strange laws of time, which are among the techniques of this novel, are what make us inevitably read the aforementioned questions; because the hour of time, when it inhabits societies, its situation differs from one society to another, and in this society it may move faster or slower.