Ms. Hen reviews The Passion

 

The Passion

Jeanette Winterson

Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd

1987

Ms. Hen picked up this book at a Little Free Library near where she lives because she had read other books by this author and loved them. She saw Ms. Winterson at a conference once, and she thought she was a breathtaking speaker, and her presentation was almost like a revival meeting. She decided this novel was the perfect one to read during election week.

THE PASSION is about characters surrounding Napoleon; a young man, Henri, who is in the army and works as his waiter, and serves him chicken (which Ms. Hen was excited about) and Villanelle, a woman from Venice, whose father was a boatman, who has webbed feet that she never shows anyone. Originally Henri's passion is for Napoleon, but he falls in love with Villanelle when they leave Russia together and abandon the army, where she was indentured as a prostitute, as a vivendiere, one that travels with the army to service the men. At the time they left, she only served the officers. Villanelle's passion is for the woman she loved for nine nights, years ago, who stole her heart, literally, and keeps it in a jar in her house covered with a shift.

Ms. Hen thinks this is a beautiful novel, even though she thought it was a little too short. She likes short books because she can read them fast, and write about them fast, and this one seemed like it is meant to be brief, but she liked living in this world. This is a book strewn with fairy tales; it reminds Ms. Hen of Marquez, but with a Venetian, European flavor. This novel is about gambling, war, fighting, love, obsession, madness and redemption.

Ms. Hen was thrilled that this novel is full of chickens. She thinks that the last time she read a book so full of them was when she read ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE and reviewed it here. The first sentence of this novel mentions chickens, "It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock." Apparently, Napoleon loved chicken and he ate it all the time. Napoleon was a dictator, and in the way of dictators, he always had to have his own way. These days some dictators are not generals, but instead, they are TV stars, but they act the same fashion. 

When Henri first meets Villanelle, she and Patrick, the former priest from Ireland, are eating chicken, "The pair of them were wolfing chicken legs and offered one to me." After that the three of them attempt to walk from Moscow to Venice. It's a long way to walk, and they did not know what to expect at first.

Ms. Hen was enraptured by this novel. It surprised her, and she likes to be surprised. She didn't know what it was about when she started reading it, but sometimes the right book comes along at the right time. She believes in fairy tales, and that they are important, because a fairy tale can be anything we want it to be, and it can tell us what we need to know in a way we don't expect.