Orlanda: A Novel by Jacqueline Harpman

 So this novel is an example of why I don't keep "To read" lists, why I hate searching for something to read in Libby, and why think that the internet and the algorithm is the death of discovery.

I would never have picked this book up if I hadn't run across it in the library.  Orlanda was on a "New titles" shelf near the door, and somehow the combination of the title, its 50s style modernist cover, and the note under the author's name stating "author of I who have never known men" (which I think I've heard of?) whimpelled me to pick it up. ('Whimpelled' is an inadvertent coinage, but it's perfectly apt so its staying). 

I took it out.  I read it almost immediately.  I'm really glad I ran across it.

Bookstores. Libraries. Physical copies of books that enter your life, and sometimes wait patiently on your shelf for years until it's the right time for you to read them. That's how I want my reading life to unfold.

Anyway, what is this book, and why am I glad to have found it?  Orlanda was inspired by Orlando by Virginia Wolf, and our heroine is in fact reading Orlando as the novel opens. Unlike Orlando, where the protagonist mysteriously changes gender multiple times over a fantastically long life, in Orlanda the protagonist looks up from her reading, bored, at a beautiful young man having a coffee in the same cafe -- and half of her soul leaps. From that point on, half of Aline remains Aline, 35 year-old literature professor with a staid life, and half becomes the carefree, carelessly sexual Lucien Lefrene. 

This is not a novel premise for a novel -- viz Orlando, of course, but also Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer (winner of the 1994 Tiptree award). What makes Orlanda compelling is the execution.  The writing is wonderful.  

Let us listen too for awhile.  Schumann had such a brief life that we owe it to him to devote a few moments to his music. Time kills us, second after second, and we fools continue to be impatient. Oh! for tomorrow, next week, for the moment we're awaiting finally to come. But, reckless soul, it will all end! Suppose you tried instead to enjoy the present? Stop, listen. Your heart is beating, thick blood flows through your veins, you are alive, make the most of it now, don't say that enjoyment will come later. It's here, it's happening now, and it won't last long, every note of the concerto dies away. When you come to the end of the first movement, you can play the record again, but you can't restart the record of your life, for that is only played once.

And the structure is interesting too.  The story is told by 'the author', who addresses the reader directly, as in the passage above, explaining, exhorting, popping into the perspectives of Aline, Lucien, Orlanda, Orlanda's lover, Lucien's sister, etc. as needed to move the story along.  It's lovely to read something that isn't in the ubiquitous "close third person" that is de rigeur in modern genre fiction.  And it's lovely to occasionally read something literary.

What is the message of the book? Of course, as in Larque, Harpman chooses a sexy 20 year old gay male persona to be the foil for her middle-aged female protagonist. But the sex (from which 'the author' mostly deliberately and prudishly turns her face and her pen) isn't the point. The point is both to compare the freedom and care-freedom possible in young male life with the repression and responsibility common to 'properly raised' middle class women. (One of Orlanda's first acts after being freed from Aline is to bound energetically across a station platform to catch his train, enjoying the exhilaration of unself-conscious movement, the freedom not to care about snagging his stockings or looking weird.)  But Harpman digs deeper too.  The two halves of Aline's severed soul both relish their freedom from one another, but they are also increasingly attracted to ..... Each other? Themselves?  Would we be our own perfect companions? What do we need from others? What do we need from ourselves?

Just a few of the questions that Orlanda raises, but of course does not answer because this is literature, not a user manual.

An enjoyable brief read, republished in English to mark the 30th anniversary of its original publication in French.  (A book that would be very different if written today, as highlighted by the new afterword provided by a modern novelist who ponders and then rejects the hypothesis that Aline is trans.)