Review: Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz, at Locus

One of the unexpected curiosities of growing older is watching the train of "rediscovered" books come back around for a second try. In my teens, I read a book called I Who Have Never Known Men, by a Belgian-Jewish author named Jacqueline Harpman. A gender-based dystopia about a young girl who grows up in an underground bunker with a group of women, it was a dark, elliptical novel (one that many critics have tied to Harpman's experience of fleeing the Nazis as a child). I didn't particularly get on with it, but it has lingered with me for decades.

Flash forward an undisclosed number of years, and I Who Have Never Known Men has become a BookTok sensation and a runaway bestseller. Naturally the response by publishers is to see if the rest of Harpman's voluminous catalogue might prove a similar hit. They are now testing the waters by reissuing a novel that was already translated into English in the 90s, Orlanda. Pitched at a very different emotional register than I Who Have Never Known Men, Orlanda is a romp about a buttoned-up woman who transfers a part of her personality—the part she identifies as masculine—into the body of a man. My review of the novel is online today at Locus:

No sooner does she have this thought than Aline achieves it. The part of her that she identi­fies as masculine – "the energy, anger and vigor, which so alarm me at times because they feel like violence" – jumps into the body, and displaces the mind, of Lucien Lefrène, a twentyish music journalist. As the remainder of Aline proceeds, unaware of the transformation she has wrought, to board her train, her male half – whom the novel's arch, almost catty narrator quickly dubs Orlanda – sets about transforming Lucien's life, in determined pursuit of all the pleasures and desires that Aline, so obsessed with feminine propriety, had denied herself. He quits his job, shrugs off his obligations to Lucien's friends and family, and – having rediscovered the sex drive that Aline has so relentlessly suppressed – spends his evenings cruising for handsome men.

As I note in the review, Orlanda constantly teeters on the verge of severe gender essentialism, and its premise even has the potential of validating the transphobic perception that trans men transition because they are too oppressed by life as a woman. I don't know how much awareness of trans issues Harpman had (and I obviously can't speak for how trans readers will react to the novel). But to me, Orlanda brims with joy at its protagonists' gender-play, and their parallel journeys of self-discovery, in a way that feels quintessentially trans-affirming. Parts of the novel even felt to me like a powerful metaphor for transition, particularly the way that the heroine and her male half both feel that they have grown beyond the person they were before they decided to be true to themselves. I'll be curious to see how trans critics react to the novel, and I hope that it does herald a broader rediscovery of Harpman's writing.

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