"If this is what people call life?"

Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" was released on October 11, 1928 in London. As liberating relax after the rigors of the course of the emergence of "Miss Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse" (dt. "To the Lighthouse") wrote, "Orlando" is not in line with the very great works of Virginia Woolf. The author slips it into the figure of a biographer, who tells the story of the androgynous creature Orlando over several centuries. The amount of time that is covered here, ranging from Elizabethan England to the 1928.

At the beginning is the youth Orlando: A poetry enthusiastic boy who dreams of great literary fame. After all, he is in the service of Queen Elizabeth and grows up at their favorite. Soon the first love disappointment and then follow a long journey as an envoy to the Turkish court. It is the great and eternal theme of writer that we encounter in "Orlando": the transformation of man. The big highlight lands Woolf when she after days of sleeping can awaken a woman Orlando:

"The trumpeters, ranging Themselves side by side in order, blow one terrific blast: -
'THE TRUTH! at Which Orlando woke. He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! We Have No Choice but left confess - he was a woman. "

Vita Sackville-West, the beloved Virginia Woolf, was the inspiration for Orlando. Your aristocratic origin related a family history that extends over several centuries. 8 illustrations are added to the book, partly Vita itself to seeing some people from their environment itself. A more detailed knowledge of the biography Vitas allows to interpret references and recognize people. But all that is not necessary to feel great pleasure in reading "Orlando". Certainly, who loves Virginia Woolf, who loves them for firework-like inner monologues, for experienced speech passages which have gone down in almost every manual. "Orlando" are under such criteria considerably more economical, but its strength lies particularly in the ironic representations of the respective eras who lived through Orlando. Who famous figures - as an Alexander Pope, for example - knows who revels in his cynical remarks. In Victorian times like the romantic undertone transfiguring.

Weakness can also be used for strength. And so it's probably just the apparent ease of the novel that Woolf gave her first big commercial success. Upscale aesthetic standards keeps this fantastic story but still stood. And even when Woolf was aware that they are not their Opus Magnum had produced here, so know your in beautiful prose cast - and thus perpetuated - to inspire love for Vita Sackville-West even today.

Who Orlando can not get enough, the film look in. In it there is a good mercilessly playing Tilda Swinton as Orlando, beautifully photographed landscapes, a strong soundtrack and discover more.