Present at the Creation--Virginia Woolf's "Orlando"

Staggeringly brilliant. "Orlando" vaults immediately onto my all-time "Ten Best" list, and Woolf joins Stendahl and Ishiguro and Potocki and their compeers in a very elite club. I had stumbled upon this novel on the shelves of my local public library at the age of seven or eight and had passed it up, imagining that it was merely a modern version of "Orlando Furioso" or the "Chanson de Roland." A few days ago, I found it again at a used book store at a dollar for a pristine copy and, having been thoroughly impressed by "Mrs. Dalloway," I acquired it with considerable confidence in its worthiness to enter my collection. This will in all likelihood be the best dollar I will ever spend. How did I get through four years at an Ivy League college without ever hearing this novel even mentioned? For those who fail to appreciate this literary tour-de-force I have inestimable pity. To borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot, one would have to be a hopelessly private person not to perceive that one is in the presence of genius and wit of a very high order indeed. A love letter for the tradition of English letters, a meditation on the writer's craft, a eulogy for the decline of the landed interest, a bravura performance by a sublime master of the language, and an acceptance of the reality of change and an embrace of the modern world, this "biography" is about gender politics in much the same way that "Moby Dick" is about fishing.