Orlando

Book title: Orlando Author: Virginia Woolf Publisher: Dar Al-Ain for Publishing Number of pages: 282 About the book: In 1962, Naguib Mahfouz conducted an interview with Ahmed Abbas Saleh, and he said about his literary style in the trilogy and before it: "I know that I write a style I read its obituary with Virginia Woolf," as Virginia Woolf presented a qualitative leap in our concept of the modern novel, not only changing the history of women but also changing the concept of literature, among others in the same movement. The talk is not limited only to stream of consciousness or writing through genre. It may also seem strange that another woman, Nazik Al-Malaika, made a qualitative shift in the concept of poetry, and the launch of free verse, which was like breaking the traditional ode, and the pillar of poetry—in the view of Abdullah Al-Ghudami—one of the most prominent signs of masculinity and virility. The discussion here is not about women or femininity and questions of sexual and gender identity, although the novel is full of these questions, which may seem classical in the eyes of Western society, even though we still need to raise them in our Arab culture because of the strange laws of time, about which Woolf said in this novel: "But unfortunately, time, despite its effect on animals and plants that bloom or wither, does not possess the same capacity as human intellect. The human mind is strange, which in turn affects the body of time. An hour of time, once the mysterious human soul settles, may become fifty or a hundred times more, and the same hour can pass over the human mind as one second. This astonishing contradiction between our materialistic perspective of time, the time we hear its ticking and see its hands moving before us, and the immaterial perspective of our minds, is a problem that has not been addressed as it should be."