Orlando – Virginia Woolf

I really admired Sally Potter’s movie of this from a few year’s back, so I was pleased that the book was even better – a rare conjunction indeed.

It’s a faux-biography of a character born in the 1500s who lives until Woolf’s “present day” (about 1927) and changes from a man to a woman halfway through. As such, it’s a fascinating and highly readable precursor to the magical realists, particularly in the way that the miraculous events are barely commented upon and are accepted by narrator and characters alike.

It also reminded me of A.S.Byatt’s Possession, another brilliant interrogation of the impossibility of the biographer’s task.

A great start to 2007.