Ms. Hen reviews ANNIHILATION

Two hens watch Annihilation together

Annihilation

Directed by Alex Garland

2018

Ms. Hen wanted to see this film when it came out in theaters earlier this year, but it was out for such a short time, she didn’t see it. She prefers to watch movies at home and not in the theater, so she can do what she wants when she watches them, and can have privacy instead of being squished and trapped in a theater for hours.

Ms. Hen rented this the first week it came out, and she was dazzled. This is a science fiction movie with mostly female characters, which is extraordinary because these types of films usually consist of primarily male characters. Ms. Hen loved that these women were going into the shimmer to help discover what happened and what the shimmer actually is.

Natalie Portman’s character, Lena, is a scientist, and a former member of the army. Her husband, also a member of the army, disappears for a year, and when he comes back, he tries to explain how he can’t tell her what happened and where he was. He gets sick, and she calls an ambulance, and they are intercepted by what seems to be military. Lena discovers that he was in the shimmer, trying to find out about it with an expedition.

Dr. Ventress explains to Lena what the shimmer has done to the area, and how nobody comes out of it the same, if they do at all. The doctor is heading a search party inside with some other women, and Lena goes with them. The rag-tag bunch of diverse women all have a reason they don’t want to go back to the world, and Lena discovers that they all have lost the will to live in one way or another.

The shimmer is a strange place where odd things happen. Ms. Hen thinks it’s similar to ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and going down the rabbit hole. The women meet animals that don’t belong there, and flowers look like they’re growing in the wrong place. Time does not happen in the same way as it happens outside the shimmer, and the women seem to lose a couple of days after they first arrive.

There is a lot of discussion between the women of “Going to the lighthouse,” the place where the shimmer seems to originate, which made Ms. Hen think of Virginia Woolf’s novel TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. Ms. Hen read this book twice, and she didn’t like it either time, but it’s well respected in literary circles. In the novel, the characters talk about going to the lighthouse the whole book, and at the end, they go to the lighthouse. Ms. Hen didn’t like the book because she thought it was boring. She liked other books by Woolf, however. Ms. Hen thinks that the characters in ANNIHILATION talk about this because it’s their dream, what they hope will be the end of their journey, where they will find all the answers, similar to the novel. Ms. Hen liked this film better than that novel.

Many other symbolic things appear in this film. It also has Bibliical references, and mythological references. This is a beautifully made, intelligent science fiction film. It didn’t get widespread release because the movie is strange, but Ms. Hen thinks that the general public doesn’t have good taste in movies anyway. The ones that make all the money are never the best films. Ms. Hen is a film snob as well as a book snob, and other types of snob as well. She can’t really afford to be a snob, but she can’t help it.

Ms. Hen doesn’t write a lot of film reviews because she mostly writes about books, and she chose to limit what she writes so her blog doesn’t take over her life. She watches a lot of films, and she loves this one, and it fits into what she has been reading, the going down the rabbit hole theme. Ms. Hen recommends this film to people like her who like strange things.

Ms. Hen reviews THE BEGINNING OF SPRING

The Beginning of Spring

Penelope Fitzgerald

Harper Collins

1988

Ms. Hen bought this book at the library she frequents – the audacity – to buy a book at the library – but it was inexpensive, and she had read another book by this author, so she bought it and read it and thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is a small, charming novel about a British man living in Russia in the pre-World War I era, during the spring of 1913. Frank Reid’s wife has just left him to go back to England, and she put the three children back on the train to Moscow by themselves. Frank is distraught that the children travelled on the train by themselves, and he has to manage them by himself when they get home. Even though he has a house full of servants, he has to find someone to watch the children while he is at work at the printing press he owns.

Strange things happen in this novel. Frank is looking for someone to watch the children when they get out of school, so he asks his neighbor who also has children to look over them. The day they arrive at that house, a baby bear cub is given to the thirteen year old boy as a gift, and the boy gets the bear drunk on vodka, the bear dances around, and then the servant throws hot coals on it, and sets it on fire. Ms. Hen thinks this is one of the most tragically dark humorous scenes she has ever read in a book. It’s disturbing, and even though it’s fiction, she believes that things like this could have happened in Russia at that time, since they were a wild people.

Frank eventually hires Lisa, an employee at a department store, who does not speak English, to watch the children. He falls in love with her, and so do all the other men around her. She is an enigma that Frank cannot comprehend until the end of the novel.

This novel is called THE BEGINNING OF SPRING, and it takes place in a few weeks at the end of Lent in March and April. The novel has a definite odor to it: Frank muses about when the ice melts on the river at a certain time of year, and it's the mark that spring is coming, and it’s his favorite time of year. A chosen day comes when the windows are opened in Moscow and the fresh air gets into the houses. There is also an odor to the people: Ms. Hen could smell the cabbage and the cold coming off them when they enter the house.

It is said in this book that Russia is a place of contradictions, and this novel is a book of contradictions. When Ms. Hen thought one thing would happen, something completely different happened, and nothing seemed to follow a path of certainty. Sometimes life can be full of surprises, and the events in our lives cannot be plotted out, and some things aren’t what they seem. This novel proves that can be true.

There are several hens and chickens mentioned in this novel, which made Ms. Hen happy. The student Volodya breaks into the printing press, and Frank confronts him, and Volodya starts to make a speech, “Then he makes a wide gesture with both arms, as if scattering food for hens.” Ms. Hen thinks this is a colorful way of describing a gesture.

Ms. Hen loved this little book. She read it because it was short, and she wanted to finish something fast, but there is substance to the story about a family and their problems. Even though the author is not Russian, and did not live in Russia during this era, she captured a time and place with certainty and confidence and color. Moscow in 1913 came to life for Ms. Hen, and she lost herself there for a while.

Ms. Hen reviews ALIAS GRACE

Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood

Doubleday

1996

Ms. Hen decided to read this because she likes Margaret Atwood, and she had heard of the Netflix show, and was curious about the book. She checked it out of the library, and even though it was a hardcover, she read it nonstop for a week, and did not do anything else with her spare time. Ms. Hen thought it was that good.

ALIAS GRACE is historical fiction about a young Irish woman living in Canada, Grace Marks, who is in prison for murdering her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and the housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. She was convicted along with her fellow servant James McDermott, who has been hung for the crime, but her sentence was commuted to life in prison. The novel centers around Dr. Simon Jordan interviewing Grace, trying to discover if she is innocent because she cannot remember what happened during the time of the murders. Dr. Jordan is a doctor of the mind, and he has traveled to Europe to visit lunatic asylums there, in hopes of starting a quality one in the United States, where he is from.

Grace never has any good luck. Her father is a drunk and beats her mother, and does not work. He is English, and in Ireland, he gets in trouble for associating with Orangemen. The family emigrates to Canada, and the mother dies on the way. Grace has to do all the work of taking care of the family, and her father sends her out to get a job in service. Grace makes a friend, Mary Whitney, whom she shares a bed in the house where they both are servants. She is employed at lots of other houses until she ends up at the Kinnear residence in the countryside. Nancy hires her because she cannot do all the work alone.

Grace doesn’t know what is happening in the house, until James McDermott tells her that Nancy is Mr. Kinnear's mistress. Grace thinks Nancy is strange, because she is friendly one moment, and nasty the next. Grace doesn’t like working at the house. Grace tells Dr. Jordan all about her life, up until the times of the murders. She thinks that he will help her get out of jail. She doesn’t know what has happened to her family or the people she has known. Dr. Dupont, who is in disguise, and is someone Grace has known previously, hypnotizes Grace, and she becomes possessed, or so it seems. Dr. Jordan is upset that the people in the audience want him to write about the hypnosis, but he doesn’t want to do so because he thinks it would make him a laughingstock in the medical profession.

Ms. Hen thinks this is one of the best books she has read in while. She has read some great books lately, but this is one of her favorites this year. She thinks that ALIAS GRACE is historical fiction about how terrible it is to be a woman, and THE HANDMAID’S TALE is futuristic fiction about how terrible it is to be a woman, so they are variations on the same theme. Grace feels threatened by men; she cannot go anywhere or do anything without the fear of men. Her friend Mary Whitney tells her she should not go to the privy (outhouse) by herself at night alone, because something could happen to her. That is what women had to deal with in the early nineteenth century, and the problems continue today, but in different ways.

Even though this novel is tragic, Ms. Hen was happy that it is full of hens and chickens. One significant scene in which chickens played part is when Nancy tells Grace to kill a chicken for dinner, and Grace can’t bring herself to do so, “I went to the henyard and caught a plump young fowl, a white one, crying all the time, and tucked it securely in my arm, and went towards the woodpile and the chopping block, wiping my tears with my apron; for I did not see how I could do such a thing.” Jamie Walsh comes along and kills the chicken for Grace. Grace is delicate and can’t handle killing a chicken, but she changes and becomes a different person when she helps McDermott kill Nancy.

Ms. Hen cannot begin to describe how much she loved this book. She thinks she feels this way because she understands the character, someone who is trapped, and does not have any choice about the course of her life. But Grace lived her life, and she dealt with her troubles. This novel is based on actual events, and Ms. Hen shudders when she thinks that these things could have happened to someone. The world is a difficult place for women, and always has been.

Ms. Hen reviews STONE ARABIA

Stone Arabia

Dana Spiotta

Simon & Schuster

2011

Ms. Hen read this book because she learned about it a while ago, and it was on her library list for a long time. She finally got around to reading it, and she was glad she did. There are very few books that Ms. Hen can’t stop reading, and this is one of them. She sped through this novel because she was engrossed with reading about the characters’ strange lives.

This novel is about a woman, Denise, and her family: her relationships with her brother, her mother, and her daughter. Denise lives alone and she worries about her brother Nik, a talented musician who has never become completely successful. Nik battles with drugs and alcohol, and keeps a record of his life he calls the Chronicles, written documents that are not completely factual. Denise worries about her mother, who is slipping into dementia. Denise thinks she is losing her memory also. Her daughter, Ada, wants to make a documentary about Nik and his life.

Denise lives alone and she watches the news constantly. She becomes obsessed with tragedy when she reads and watches TV, and cries herself to sleep over the stories of children killed at school, and an Amish girl who is kidnapped in upstate New York, and many others. Denise can’t help but become distraught over these news items and she loses sleep and becomes depressed.

This novel reminded Ms. Hen of the book she had just read, DEMONOLOGY, by Rick Moody, because it seemed to her as if the characters lived in the same world as the characters in STONE ARABIA, a weird world, and one that is unpredictable and could explode at any moment. Ms. Hen read in the acknowledgements that Dana Spiotta thanked Rick Moody, and Ms. Hen imagines they must be friends and have compared notes about writing. Ms. Hen enjoyed STONE ARABIA more than the other book, however. She thinks this book has better substance and color and has more sympathetic characters.

There was something about this book that Ms. Hen loved. She loved that Denise was unstable, and her brother was talented and erratic. She loved the fact that Denise is trying to figure out what her brother wants and what he is going to do next. Denise and Nik are the only children in their family, and their father left them when they were young, and the mother worked a lot, so they were left to themselves much of the time. They were their only family in the beginning of their lives, and they knew each other so well, that they could predict what each other would do. Ms. Hen thinks this is one of the only novels she has read recently about adult siblings who have a close relationship.

Ms. Hen recommends this book because it is like real life, and it shows a family and how dysfunctional it can be, but how they can love each other. Some families don’t have a connection like the one in this novel. This novel also shows how adults can unravel and become unstable and almost lose their minds. Modern day society is not set up for sensitive people who take everything personally. Delicate people can crack if they don’t take care of themselves. Ms. Hen knows this is true, but she is a tough hen now, as tough as she can be, for a hen.

Ms. Hen reviews DEMONOLOGY

Demonology

Rick Moody

Little, Brown and Company

2001

Ms. Hen decided to read this book because she found it at a used bookstore, read the opening paragraph about a man wearing a rubber chicken head, and fell in love with the beginning of the story, “The Mansion on the Hill.” It took her a while to read the entire book, because she was focused on other things, but she got around to reading it in between library books.

Ms. Hen found that a lot of the stories in this collection have to do with car accidents, or other types of accidents. The story, “Mansion on the Hill,” is about a man grieving his sister who has died in a car accident. He starts working at a wedding company, and strange things happen there. The story, “Forecast from the Retail Desk,” is about a man who can predict the future, and he predicts his classmate’s death in a car accident when he is in high school.  The story “Hawaiian Night” is about a party at a resort, and a boat accident occurs.

Ms. Hen didn’t like the story “Pan’s Fair Throng,” a type of fairy tale. She doesn’t think it fits in with the collection at all, and she thought it was jarring. Whenever she reads collections of short stories, there are usually one or two she does not like.

The story, “The Carnival Tradition,” is the longest in the book. Ms. Hen didn’t like some of the characters, but she liked the story because it is about memory, and the things that happen to people when they remember things. It is a haunting story about two people, who were a couple for a short time, who look back to when they were young.

Ms. Hen read the story, “Boys,” in a class when she was in college. She recalls learning that it’s a good example of repetition in a story, and poetic writing. She thinks she had to do an exercise that had to do with the story, but she doesn't know if she remembers correctly.

Ms. Hen wanted to punch lot of the characters in these stories in the face. Many of them are quite obnoxious, especially in the story, “The Ineluctable Modality of the Vagina.” The two characters in that story irritated Ms. Hen.

Ms. Hen liked this collection of short stories, though she thought some stories were better than others. She didn’t love the book, but most of the characters are realistic and seem genuine, and she admires that in writing. Characters are what make quality writing, even though the reader might not enjoy them, and wouldn’t want to hang out with them, if they’re well drawn, they make the writing come alive.

Ms. Hen reviews KINDRED

Kindred

Octavia E. Butler

Beacon Press

1979

Ms. Hen decided to read this book because she is interested in women science fiction writers. She had heard of Octavia Butler, but did not know anything about her. She is one of the only African American women science fiction writers. She is also the only sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Ms. Hen was impressed when she learned this.

This novel is difficult to read. Dana and her husband, Kevin are moving into a new house on Dana’s twenty-sixth birthday. Suddenly, she gets transported to the antebellum South, where her ancestor, Rufus, a slave owner, is about to die as a child. She saves him from drowning, but almost gets shot by his father, then is sent back to present day. Dana keeps going back to Maryland in that time, and it always happens when Rufus is in trouble and might be killed. She is considered a slave because she is black. Once she goes back with her husband Kevin.

Ms. Hen thought this book was hard because it brought her into the mind of a 1970s woman stuck in the time of slavery. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be Dana sent back to that time again and again, but it was realistic, though it is complete fantasy. It disturbed Ms. Hen to feel this way, to feel as if she were helpless and had no control over the character’s lives. This is what slavery was, having no control over your own destiny, and always at the whim of the master.

This book reminded Ms. Hen of slave narratives, and it was based on such books. Ms. Hen has read Frederick Douglass, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Ms. Butler read this book as well and created her novel inspired by what she read. It also reminded Ms. Hen of BELOVED by Toni Morrison.

Ms. Hen thinks this is a book that everyone should read because it makes the reader look at what happened to this character and try to figure out what occurred. She is sent back in time to make sure her great-grandmother was born, but she learns of the details of the horrible circumstances in which the people lived. She got to see first-hand the experiences of her ancestors. There is no explanation why this happened, but Ms. Hen thinks it is a lesson that we must learn from the past, and teach the future generations the history of ourselves and the world around us.

Ms. Hen loved this book, though she thought it was disturbing. But since she is a hen that likes to be disturbed, she gives it high marks. Not everything Ms. Hen reads can be nice, and she likes it that way. This book also goes along with Ms. Hen’s going down the rabbit hole theme, and especially the TV show THE MINISTRY OF TIME, the Spanish show about time travel. Ms. Hen will travel through time as much as she can, because she is an adventurous hen.

Ms. Hen reviews JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

Ms. Hen enjoys the Earth

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Jules Verne

Translated from the French by Frederic Amadeus Malleson

1864, 2017

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel on her phone because she thought it would be ironic to read one of the classics of sci-fi on a device. She felt silly doing so, and she didn’t enjoy it as much as she would if she had read a real book. She stopped reading books on her Kindle a few years ago, but recently bought an Ipad, so she got the Kindle app, and it appeared on her phone.

She thinks reading a book on her phone or device is not really reading. She doesn’t think she gets as much out of reading a device as she does a book; she doesn’t digest the information as well as a hard copy. She wrote a blog post about this a few years ago, which you can read here: http://mshenreviewsthings.blogspot.com/2015/12/ms-hen-bids-adieu-to-her-kindle.html

Ms. Hen liked this novel, and she thought it was charming, but it’s not her cup of tea. It’s an adventure book, similar to MOBY DICK. She admires the creativity and the plot, but the situations aren’t interesting enough for her.

This novel is about Axel and his uncle, a German geologist, who find a book with a description of how to get into the earth through a volcano in Iceland. The two travel to Iceland, and find a guide to help them get to where they want to go. They go in the volcano and have an adventure.

Ms. Hen liked the descriptions of Iceland in that time. They seemed like a primitive people, and almost barbaric, but charming and quaint in their own way. Not a lot of food grows in Iceland, and the inhabitants had to scrounge for what they could. These days, they have imported food and hothouses, but back then, they did not have the knowledge or technology.

Ms. Hen read this because it is another type of novel about going down a rabbit hole, such as ALICE IN WONDERLAND. She is fascinated by this right now, and she wants to know how to write such plots. Ms. Hen does not recommend reading a book on your phone, and she didn’t love this book, but it is a taste of speculative fiction in its infancy, which Ms. Hen admires.