Jacqueline Harpman

While struggling to re-read Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," Aline Berger, a thirtysomething literature professor, begins an intimate relationship with Lucien Lefrene, a 20-year-old rock journalist

Orlanda

Aina

And the answer formed in her mind, clear and inescapable, even though we know it was incomplete: because I'm always sad and I pretend to be happy. I put on a cheeriness that I don't feel.

She doesn’t know herself, but who does? Don't we all go through life in the same ignorance of who we realy are, eager to grasp any description of ourselves that gives us the illusion of having a simple identity that can be summed up in a few words?

Are our lives ruled by unspoken laws which surreptitiously restrict us? Suddenly confronted with a hidden side of herself, she hesitates briefly, finds it to her liking and joyfully adopts it? Are our principles, our rules, our convictions — everything we believed to be governed by reason — only the product of obsolete docility?