Orlanda - Prix Médicis 1996
par Sarah_DD, le 2008-06-18 15:55:05
L'histoire est sympa, se rapproche d'une quête du "moi" dans laquelle elle dissocie les faces positive et négative d'un individu via un narrateur extra-diégétique. C'est comme un petit jeu sur...
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Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes
La plage d'Ostende
L'Orage rompu
Among the many imaginative works sparked by the life and writings of Virginia Woolf, Orlanda may be the first to offer its own compelling narrative voice rather than succumbing, like a drunken bee, to the seductive rhythms of Woolf's prose and the sway of her metaphors. Even readers who relished Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, for example, must have been aware of how closely it followed and evoked Mrs. Dalloway. The narrator of Orlanda, on the other hand, isn't even certain she entirely likes Woolf's writing.
A novelist with graying hair, whom we are invited to identify with Jacqueline Harpman herself, she reports with wonder, amusement, and occasional condescension on the strange transformation experienced by the main character, a Belgian professor named Aline Berger, whose suppressed tomboy half splits off from her in a café off the Gard du Nord and inhabits the body of a 20-year-old man. The narrator dubs this new creature "Orlanda," hoping the name will be taken as "the humble tribute of an admirer and not the vulgar plagiarism of somebody devoid of imagination." Watching Orlanda glory in his newfound physical freedom, indulging in athletic sex, huge meals, and odd fits of housecleaning, might seem more enjoyable for a reader than tracking Aline through her mild-mannered days, but it is Aline who gains the most by this gradual recognition of her divided self and her attempts to bridge the gulf.
Woolf's lyrical, fantastic novel Orlando, which Aline has been reluctantly rereading for a class she must teach, proves to be the starting point for her self-awareness, as she realizes that it is not about the sexually ambiguous Vita Sackville-West, as literary historians would have it, but about the young Virginia Woolf--a "boy," with all the liberties of boyhood, who at puberty had to become a girl. Struck by her idea, Aline "was ecstatic: Childhood is when the years pass and you don't