📘 Jacqueline Harpman, Orlanda
He shrugged: “That's all I know. You were reading, I was bored, locked away inside your soul when it was a nice day and there were plenty of men who were very much alive, and who are not so unlucky as to have lost their sexual identity. This handsome young man you see before you also looked bored and I felt like going over to him.”
This book was chosen by Katja for Reading the Globe '26, and it's also why i re-read Orlando last month. Now, it is only obliquely that Orlanda borrows from Orlando's premise, and i think it has a very specific logic to it.
While discussing Orlando last month, i made a note of Virginia Woolf's racist and imperialist tendencies, this time, i would like to declare that while there are no excuses for Woolf's attitude, i much prefer her plainspoken approach to her prejudices. Woolf weaves Orlando's adventures into the fabric of English history; she does not shy away from laying bare the realities of imperialism for her readers, in fact, she makes it crystal clear that it is the plunder wrought by the English empire and its associates that are the very condition of Orlando's leisure, for his adventures, for her eventual literary fame.
Unlike Woolf, Harpman appears utterly unconscious of the material reality of her novel's setting. Viewed at a distance from the internal monologues of Aline and Orlanda, this is the story of a bourgeois woman murdering a working class man, but not before colonising his body and taking it for a test-drive, wherein she proceeds to tear his life and family apart, indirectly killing his mother. Oh, i knew from a mile away that Lucien's gun would be trained on his own heart, though not necessarily by his own hand. In short, the English empire that dominates Woolf's tale is refigured into the individual fantasies of a disgruntled English literature professor, who believes that everything about a text can be found within the text itself.
In short, this book was not for me. It had its intricacies, certainly: Harpman brings up the question of science fiction, Aline's guilty pleasure, but the author never ruminates on the potentialities Orlando explored in the genre. Woolf was a contemporary of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, she was certainly aware of the discourses surrounding that inchoate literary form that Wells called scientific romance, that we would recognise as science fiction. But Harpman only employs science fiction as a popular genre, an anti-thesis to the canonical literature Orlando represents, what a respectable English professor like Aline in meant to be reading. The French edition of Orlanda was published in 1996, nearly two decades after Delany's meditations on the science fiction genre and his assertion that it must be studied as seriously as canonical literature, but it appears that Harpman, and perhaps the French university had missed the memo. And i cannot help but feel that Harpman nearly hit on something interesting, but missed it entirely, and i could not tell you why.
Not even the long sections recounting Melanie Klein's interpretation of Freud'psychoanalytic theory (for that is the contemplative heart of the novel) managed to distract me from the fundamental carelessness of the novel, and more than that, the final word on morality put me right off the book. i could go on to read Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover Landfall, or something by John Wyndham to explore the text more thoroughly, but i simply am not interested. Not in the least.