Ms. Hen reviews The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead

Anchor Books

2016

Ms. Hen decided to read this simply because she had heard it was good. She is always interested in reading about American slavery and the plight of African Americans, because she likes to read about tormented souls. Ms. Hen thinks that the best literature is about people with messed up lives. She likes to read about other people’s problems.

When Ms. Hen started reading this, she couldn’t get the book she had read recently, KINDRED, out of her head. KINDRED is also about slavery in the South, but it is more of a science fiction novel. Ms. Hen expected that this book would be similar to that in the way that it was magical and fanciful, but it was not as she expected. Yes, the part about the Underground Railroad actually being a railroad is fascinating, but in the beginning, she wanted more fantasy. But as she got into the book, she realized it is not like this, and she got into the story.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD is about Cora, a slave in Georgia, who lives in the house on the plantation where the outcast women live. She is ostracized because her mother ran away when she was young. She has a difficult life growing up without a mother, and always wanted to know what became of her. She is chosen by one of the men, Caesar, to go with him when he escapes, because she is a lucky charm, for the obvious fact that her mother managed to get away. They run and are almost caught. They find the Underground Railroad and are whisked away on a locomotive to safety and possibly freedom.

Cora goes with Caesar to South Carolina to find a thriving former slave community there. They manage to start to have a life, but she is almost caught. Cora goes to the underground railroad and ends up in North Carolina. She travels around until she finds people to help her.

The runaway slaves have a difficult life trying to make their way in the world. Ms. Hen has read many books about this, but this one is different. This novel has a fairy tale essence to it, it seems like it is meant to be a dream. Cora suffers and struggles, but she has a will to survive. The railroad is a symbol for all the people that made it, a symbol of perseverance and determination and dreams of a better life. Ms. Hen can imagine what it’s like to run for her life, and be terrified. That’s what reading fiction helps us to do.

There are lots of chickens and hens in this book, which made Ms. Hen happy. One of the other slaves on the plantation in Georgia, Ava, wanted Cora’s small plot of land, “She cherished her chickens more than those children and coveted Cora’s land to expand her coop.” Cora has a piece of land where she grows vegetables. Ms. Hen thinks it’s strange that a woman loved chickens more than her children, but in their time, some things didn’t make sense.

Ms. Hen truly loved this book. It has an airy, lightweight, but heavy, contradictory way about it. It is a road novel, an adventure novel, and a novel about a woman who overcomes great hardship. Readers should aspire to Cora’s strength. Ms. Hen recommends this novel to anyone who wants to be inspired to carry on.

Ms. Hen reviews In Evil Hour

In Evil Hour

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Avon Books

1968

Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa

Ms. Hen decided to read this book because she has read every other novel by Marquez, and she wanted to finish them all. This is not considered his best book, but it is his first published novel. Ms Hen didn’t like this as much as she liked the others. She thinks there may have been something wrong with the translation, because the prose is not as liquid and glorious as the other books she has read.

Even so, there are hints of the genius to come in this novel. Some elements of other novels appear, such as a telegraph office, and twisted love affairs. Ms Hen thinks that some writers have distinct styles that echo in all their works. Marquez is one of those writers whose voice carries in the scope of his writing. Another author who Ms. Hen believes follows this tradition is Haruki Murakami. All his books are fantastic, but they are similar and have recognizable traits.

Even though Ms. Hen doesn’t think this is the best Marquez novel ever, she finds it worthwhile to look back to where he started, to see the how the seed of brilliance first sprouted.

Ms. Hen reviews Unlocking the Air

Unlocking the Air

Ursula K. Le Guin

Harper Collins

1996

Ms. Hen likes science fiction, and is especially interested in women's science fiction writers right now. Even though this collection of short stories would be considered magical realism, it is what Ms. Hen enjoys. These stories are strange and wacky. These are the type that inspired Ms. Hen to want to be a writer in the first place: the idea that a story can be anything a writer wants. Ms. Hen doesn’t think writers try to write like this anymore, and if they do, the writing in uninspired. In MFA programs, the instructors try to get rid of the desire to write genre fiction like this out of the students, but Ms. Hen wants to try to go back to being a dreamer and writing things that are bizarre.

The first story in the collection is “Half Past Four,” which is an odd collection of stories in itself, about characters who have the same name and are in different situations. It took a few sections for Ms. Hen to figure out what was happening. The names of the characters, Ella, Ann, Stephen, and Theodore are in different stories and are different people in each, but they all have to do with families and relationships, and how dysfunctional people’s lives can become.

“Spoons in the Basement,” is about a woman, Georgia, who discovers coffee spoons in a closet in her house that she didn’t know were there. She doesn’t know the history of the house and who could have left them. After that, she finds a section of the house where people are living that she did not know about. This story made Ms. Hen think it’s an allegory, that there are things we don’t know about in our lives, that are underneath everything, that could either be upsetting or comforting to us. Georgia accepts that there are two nice young women living in the basement, but she doesn’t like that a middle-aged couple are living there as well. It shows that some people have innate prejudice; there shouldn’t be anyone living in a person’s house that is unknown to them, and Georgia should have been upset about all of them.

The story that haunted Ms. Hen the most was, “Olders,” which is about a woman whose husband gets hurt in a battle, and who needs to recover. The doctor comes to help him, but he is working on finding out the secret of the island. The injured man is dying and is turning into a tree. When the native people of the island die, they transform into trees. The man’s wife is not from the island, so she is not like this. Ms. Hen thinks this is a creative story, the kind that she is interested in writing. The tree people made Ms. Hen imagine what it would be like to die and become a tree. When a person is dead, nothing matters anymore, but if we become trees, we could die again, or we could get hurt if someone chopped us down. The tree people could suffer as trees, as we suffer in life.

Ms. Hen recommends this collection of short stories to anyone who is willing to go out on a limb and read a strange book, to stretch the imagination to where it is able to go, and to reach to the outer limits of our minds. Ms. Hen is a quirky hen, and she likes to be around kindred spirits who like the same things.

Ms. Hen reviews The Life of Elves

The Life of Elves

Muriel Barbery

Europa Editions

2015

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Ms. Hen picked up this novel because she loved another by this author, THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG, and she liked the title of this one. Ms. Hen found this book in a dusty bookstore, which she frequents sometimes called Commonwealth Books, which is located in an alley in downtown Boston, near the Financial District and shopping area.

Ms. Hen didn’t know what to think of this book at first. It has a very quiet and unassuming tone, and at times, she didn’t understand what was going on. This is a strange book with a strange premise, and Ms. Hen wasn’t sure if she liked it that much. She didn’t hate it, but there were times when she was reading when her mind couldn’t help but wander.

This is a novel about two girls, Maria and Clara, who live in France and Italy, respectively, who both have special powers and are enjoined to the Elven world. Maria can communicate with animals, and Clara has a gift for music. They are connected to each other in a special way.

Maria lives in the countryside in a village in France with her adopted family. Her grandmother cures people with herbs. There is a scene in the novel in which Maria moves three cloves of garlic on the hearth, and that converted the image, and that idea was repeated throughout the novel. The idea is that a simple item can be changed, and made into an artistic representation of the same thing that was there before, but morphed into something more beautiful.

Clara learns to play the piano quickly, and she could learn any piece immediately and by heart. She is taken to a place in Rome, away from her village in the mountains, in order to learn music and help discover what she is meant to do. She makes friends with the people in Rome, but does not leave the place where she lives that often. She learns about the Elven world through Petrus, who drinks and tells her stories.

There are several hens and chickens in this novel, which made Ms. Hen like it more than she would have if there weren’t. She finds that there are usually hens and chickens in French novels, because they love chickens. Ms. Hen has been to France, and she met some hens there.

Ms. Hen didn’t completely love this novel, because she couldn’t get into it enough. But she thinks it is a good book to read in the middle of summer because there is a lot of talk about snow and cold. She likes to read books about winter in the middle of a heat wave. Yesterday where Ms. Hen lives, it was 96 degrees, and it felt like 104. She doesn’t like the summer. The only good thing about summer is the fact that it’s not winter, and there is no ice on the streets, and she has more energy to read because the days are longer J

Ms. Hen makes a friend in France

Ms. Hen reviews Hospital Sketches

Louisa May Alcott's former house in Louisburg Square, Boston

Hospital Sketches

Louisa May Alcott

1863

Ms. Hen bought this small book many years ago, and finally got around to reading it. She is a big fan of Louisa May Alcott, especially the book that was never published during her lifetime because it was considered too racy, A LONG FATAL LOVE CHASE. She admires LITTLE WOMEN, but thinks Ms. Alcott would have been better off writing from her heart rather than pandering towards the attitudes of the times in which she lived.

This book is based on letters Alcott wrote to her family when she worked as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. She worked for six weeks in a hospital in Washington before she developed typhoid and was sent home.

The character Tribulation Periwinkle has a hard time deciding what to do, so she decides to be a nurse. She signs up, and has a difficult time procuring a rail pass to Washington from Boston. She goes from office to office in search of a pass, and men everywhere insult and dismiss her, but finally she succeeds. Ms. Hen thinks it’s horrible the way the character was treated like a child simply because she was a woman, and the men she dealt with thought she wasn’t worthy of respect. Ms. Hen knows that if this happened today, she hopes the character would not have to go through so much trouble. And she would be paid for their efforts.

Louisa lived at 20 Pickney St. on Beacon Hill when she was young

Ms. Hen thought it was fascinating that the Army brought young women to Washington to nurse soldiers who had absolutely no training in such work. Her first day on the job, the head nurse gives her a pail, a brush, and some soap, and tells her to wash the men who had just come from the field of Battle in Fredericksburg. Miss Periwinkle gets to know the men and cares for them, she helps them to feel better, and she learns a lot in the process.

Another aspect of this novel that struck Ms. Hen was the character’s attitude towards the former slaves. Miss Periwinkle’s family housed runaway slaves in the Underground Railroad, so she has some experience with the situation. The character saw the African Americans in Washington, and was afraid of them at first, but then she begins to understand that they are like everyone else, and they are beautiful.  She hugs and kisses a little African American boy that’s in the hospital, and the other nurses are horrified, but she wants to help the child be loved like any other child. She doesn’t like that the other nurses treat the former slaves the way they do.

Ms. Hen knows some things about hospital from first-hand experience, and Miss Periwinkle’s experience with surgeons and doctors are similar to the ones that Ms. Hen has had. The doctors are, for the most part, high and mighty, and are difficult to catch to write an order or do something for a patient. Not all doctors are like this, but many are. Things were the same during the Civil War. And the way they treat the nurses and other people in the hospital is disrespectful, though now, the nurses are also grandiose, since they make a lot of money, and think they’re smarter than the other workers around them. Ms. Hen doesn’t mean to rant, but she deals with these situations often. Ms. Periwinkle was not a trained nurse, and she was a volunteer, which confounds Ms. Hen, because if she were a nurse now, her experience would be transcendent.

Ms. Hen liked this small book. She wanted to read something fast, and she thought it was entertaining and charming, and she learned a lot about the way things used to be in world of hospitals, compared to the way they are now.

Ms. Hen, protecting herself from germs

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.