Ms. Hen reviews War and Peace Volume Two

War and Peace Volume Two

Leo Tolstoy

Wordsworth Editions Limited

First published 1869

Translated from the Russian by Louise and Aylmer Maude 1993

Ms. Hen decided to read this because she wanted to read an epic novel for St. Patrick’s Day. She intended to read FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce, but she read four pages, and thought it was the worst book she had ever read. She decided to pick up WAR AND PEACE because she had read volume one when she was an undergrad hen, and loved it. She realizes that this novel has nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day, but it’s worth reading.

This novel is about love and war, and the anguish of love and war. Prince Andrew meets a young woman, Natasha, and they fall in love. His father thinks she is too young for him, and forbids him from marrying her for a year. He doesn’t want to go away, but tells Natasha that he will marry her when he comes back. She suffers while he is away, and thinks that she is getting older (Though she is just seventeen! Those were different days.) She gets embroiled with another man, and she becomes ill.

The war is coming to Moscow, and the inhabitants are getting anxious. The people speak French in everyday speech, because it is the language of the educated, but while the French are attacking them, they chastise each other for it. Members of Natasha’s family, her brother and cousin, and parents, move from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

Napoleon is a character in this novel. Ms. Hen does not know a lot about him, but from reading this, and the things she has learned, he was unstable and a tyrant, much like our current president. There have been several comparisons to Napoleon and Hitler, and some of Hitler and our current president, but not a lot of Napoleon and the president. Ms. Hen does not know if they have much in common, but learning about Napoleon briefly from this novel made her consider this idea. She imagines Napoleon might have been more intelligent than D.T., but she is not definite on this.

Ms. Hen had an out-of-body experience while she was reading this novel. She was at work on Wednesday, and she works at a hospital. Her office was in a state of bedlam because of the corona virus, and everyone was under stress, fearing the future. When she was on the train home, reading WAR AND PEACE, a passage struck her that related to her day. The Russians were waiting for the French to attack them:

At the approach of danger, there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonable tells the man the nature of danger and the means of escaping it, the other, still more unreasonably says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is better to disregard what is painful until it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.

Ms. Hen completely relates to this passage right now in her life. She does not want to think about danger, so she spends her free time reading and writing and watching TV. She doesn’t want to think about what could happen in the future. In this novel, the characters felt the same way. Not much has changed in the way humanity reacts to danger in two hundred years, except this time, we are not being attacked in a war (in the United States) we are being attacked by a virus. A war might be faster than a virus, but either way, while in the moment, the characters in the novel, and also currently, the people involved do not know what the outcome will be.

Ms. Hen understands why this is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. The characters are realistic, and their pain is sensory. The reader can understand why their lives are so terrible. Russians look at the world differently from everyone else, it might be a more realistic way; they always look at the dark side of everything. But for every dark side, there is a bright side, the hope that things could get better. Maybe they will be better some day.  

Ms. Hen reviews Beyond Infinity at the ICA

Beyond Infinity

Yayoi Kusama

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Through February 2021

Ms. Hen does not usually write about art, because it is not her specialty.

But she wants to attempt to write about this exhibit, because she thinks

there’s a lot to say about it.

She really didn’t know what it was before she went.

She saw the pictures of the polka dots, and the mirrors.

Ms. Hen didn’t know how intense it would be.

She got an email the day before that said she could not bring bags

into the exhibit. She was sad she could not go in

but she learned about it vicariously.

The viewers are only allowed two minutes in a room that’s a small box

in a bigger room.

Only four people went in at a time.

They were not allowed to touch anything.

The room is small with tentacles covered in polka dots

coming off the floor and mirrors

on the floor and ceiling and walls. The artist recites a Japanese love poem in the room

on a loop. Ms. Hen tried to take as many pictures as she could,

but she realized that she was taking pictures and not experiencing the art.

She came to think that was the point of the exhibit.

To be Instagram worthy.

She doesn’t think it’s right that art should be meant for later,

but that’s what it is.

two minutes in the Infinity Room goes by fast.

After she left, she read the translation of the poem in English.

She thought the exhibition strange,

but she understands why people like it.

To be in a different world for a short time,

someone else’s dreamscape,

an escape from reality

into weirdness.

People need release from boring lives.

This exhibit is anything but boring.

Ms. Hen reviews Everything Here is Beautiful

Everything Here is Beautiful

Mira T. Lee

Penguin Books

2018

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because a hen friend who is a writer mentioned it to her, and she is interested in mental illness in as portrayed in fiction. She has read a lot of great novels on this subject, and some bad ones, too, and she is always intrigued to learn about the various viewpoints.

EVERYTHING HERE IS BEAUTIFUL is about two sisters, Mira and Lucia, dealing with Lucia’s mental illness, which is not specifically pinned down in the novel. She is diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and a little bit of a few things. The novel is also about love and the men in Lucia’s life: Yoni, her husband, an Israeli shopkeeper, a boisterous noisy man, and Manny, a Latino immigrant, the father of her child.

The novel is told through alternating viewpoints of Mira, Lucia, Yoni, and Manny. Ms. Hen did not think that it was difficult to discern who was talking, because the voices are distinctly different. The author does an excellent job of capturing various voices of different character, which Ms. Hen knows can be difficult.

This novel is also multicultural. Mira and her sister are Chinese American, and come from a family of immigrants. Their mother moved to America with Mira as a small child, while pregnant with Lucia, and became successful through hard work. Yoni is from Israel, and lost one arm when he was in the army. Manny is an illegal immigrant, and lives in fear when he is in New York. The novel also spans continents, from New York to Switzerland to Ecuador to Minnesota.

One of the reasons Ms. Hen admires this novel is because she thinks that the voice of Lucia when she is psychotic is realistic and believable. Ms. Hen imagined that the author might have experienced such things, because it’s not easy to write with authority about the psychotic process unless one has had direct experience, but she did research, and read some interviews with the author, and she said that she has family members with schizophrenia, and has had to be a caretaker for them. Ms. Hen was surprised when she read this, but she realizes that people who do not have mental illness can be capable of writing about it with skill.

Ms. Hen enjoyed that there are some significant chickens in this novel. When Lucia and Manny live in upstate New York, a man in a chicken suit walked around the town, and everyone called him El Pollo Loco (the crazy chicken). “Pollo was one of those neighborhood characters, wore a giant chicken suit and walked up and down Main Street every day.” Lucia interviews him for an article that is never published, and found out he is a lonely vet with PTSD. Another section with chickens is when Lucia and Manny moved to Ecuador, she would ride to the city in the chicken bus, “Finally they boarded a chicken bus, one of those old yellow busses from the States granted an illustrious afterlife, spray painted with neon colors and flamboyant designs.” A chicken bus is a bus that people ride with the chickens to get to where they’re going. Ms. Hen likes the idea of a chicken bus, and she would like to go on one someday if she has the opportunity.

Ms. Hen loved this novel, though she found it sad. She prefers to read novels about people with mental illnesses who have hope for the future, and are able to go out in the world and be productive and successful and blend in with others and have a normal life. She knows this is not possible for everyone with a major mental illness, but it is possible for others. She dreams there will be a novel published someday that gives hope to people with psychiatric issues to forge on and not be ashamed, and to live full lives.  Even though she found this book to be a downer, she thinks it’s worth reading because it’s an important story, with many different aspects to it, and she realizes that life does not always have a happy ending, and that reality can be utterly depressing at times.

Ms. Hen reviews A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Anchor Books

2010

Ms. Hen decided to read this because her hen sister bought it recently, and hadn't read it. Ms. Hen thinks this is the kind of book her hen sister would like to read if she did read books. She buys them, and they pile up, and then Ms. Hen usually borrows them and reads them eventually.

This is a novel in stories about different characters that all connect with each other surrounding the music business and show business. Ms. Hen didn’t know what it was about when she first started reading it, but she got into it quickly. She thinks this would be considered a “cool” book, and imagines it should be hoisted into the canon of other cool novels that cool people should read, which incidentally are primarily written by men, ON THE ROAD, NAKED LUNCH, POST OFFICE etc. There are certain authors that are not put on the bookshelves with other books in some bookstores because they are stolen more often. Ms. Hen doesn’t think that this novel will be a frequently pilfered book, but she thinks there should be a possibility because it is cool enough.

The novel starts with a character named Sasha who has a problem with shoplifting who is on a date with a man. She steals a woman’s wallet in the ladies room at a hotel, but gives it back. The entire novel twists around the music business, and Sasha is mentioned in several other sections of the book.

One of the characters, Rhea, who lives in San Francisco, is a teenage punk rocker who is upset that she has freckles because punk rockers aren’t supposed to have freckles. (Ms. Hen doesn’t understand this because the majority of punk rockers where she lives have or had freckles. She found out that 22.8% of the population of the Greater Boston area are of Irish decent, which is the highest in the country for a metro region. This is why freckles aren’t uncommon where she lives.)

Ms. Hen thinks the subtext is well done is this novel; there is a lot that is said without it being said.  The character Ted, Sasha’s uncle, who goes to look for her in Naples, Italy, is an adjunct art history professor, whose sons play a long list of sports. Ted doesn’t muse on his sons’ preference for sports, but the reader gets the idea that he prefers artistic endeavors, and is disappointed in his sons’ choices. Also when he meets Sasha, he finds her with a hanger bent into a circle. Nothing is said about this, but the reader can infer what that means.

There’s a section of the novel that breaks out into a PowerPoint diary by one of the characters, and it reminded Ms. Hen of ULYSSES by James Joyce, when that novel contains a play in the middle. A VISIT FROM THE GOOD SQUAD is post-modern in its own way, much like Joyce, and it becomes something entirely different at the end, but Ms. Hen won’t tell you because it’s so good, and right up her alley.

Ms. Hen adored this novel. She thinks it deserved the Pulitzer and all the other prizes it won. It’s important, not just because it’s cool, but it shows us how people can be wrapped up in their own worlds, but other’s lives are always affected, and we are all intertwined in this tapestry of the Universe, connecting or not connecting, but breathing the same air; we live on the same planet, and ultimately come from the same stardust.

Ms. Hen reviews Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Spiegel and Grau

2015

Ms. Hen picked up this book at the Little Free Library a while ago, but she decided to read it simply because it was short, and she read two lengthy books recently. She didn’t really know what it was about before she started reading it, which sometimes is a nice surprise. Not always.

This book is in the form of a letter to the author’s son talking about how difficult it is to live in the black body. Coates gives examples from his youth growing up on the rough streets of Baltimore, then through high school and college, talking about the events that occurred to him that made him who he is at the time of writing the book. He writes how traveling to France made him change his perspective on how he felt about the world.

Ms. Hen was struck by the fact that the author of this memoir is the same age as her. Most of what she has read about how difficult it is to be a black person was written about life in the United States between fifty and eighty years ago. The author discusses events that Ms. Hen remembers, which occurred when she was approximately the same age as the author. He talks about the turning points with a different view than Ms. Hen, such as 9/11, which he views as racist, since the country idolized the police officers and firefighters who Coates knew were truly racist and didn’t deserve to be so revered.

One of the aspects of this book that Ms. Hen does not agree with is the author's lack of faith. He is an atheist, and Ms. Hen does not agree with that position. Ms. Hen thinks that faith is something that can help us through difficult times. Everyone has a painful life, and nobody’s life is perfect. Ms. Hen sometimes wonders if God exists, but she believes in the power of the Universe, and an underlying force beneath everything. She believes that people without faith have no hope for happiness. Life can be terrible, but faith makes us stronger.

Ms. Hen does not believe in the Christian God, which is what the author was exposed to when he was young. It appears that the only option he had for faith was Christianity, which is not satisfactory to everyone. There is an entire world of options for faith, one can believe in the Eastern view, or one can be spiritual, or find any faith that is appealing. Ms. Hen understands that people can suffer in their lives, but her faith has pulled her through.

Ms. Hen understands why people like this book, but she does not connect to it. She does not enjoy informative nonfiction as much as she loves fiction, because with fiction she can get inside the characters and live in their heads and their bodies and become them for a short time. In this book, she did not become the book, which is sad, because she knows it’s important. Everyone has different tastes, and though this book is an award winner, and is highly respected, it is not to Ms. Hen’s taste.

Ms. Hen reviews Daughter of Fortune

Daughter of Fortune

Isabel Allende

Harper Perennial

1999

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she has read other novels by Ms. Allende, and she wished to read a new one. She chose this book because the description reminded her of another she has read, FROG MUSIC, by Emma Donoghue. Ms. Hen imagined these two books took place in the same world, the San Francisco gold rush time, when the city was a wild outpost, full of scoundrels and prostitutes, with danger at every corner, but brimming with hope and possibility.

DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE is about an orphan, Eliza, who is found on the steps of an English family’s house in Valparaiso, Chile. She is raised by a brother and sister, though she was never adopted. She is taught to be a young lady; she learns English, and takes piano lessons. She learns to cook from the maid in the house. Rose, her acting mother, likes to threaten that she will send her to the orphanage if she misbehaves. Rose has secrets, as does everyone in the house.

Eliza falls in love with a young man, Joaquin Andieta, but does not tell anyone. They become lovers, but she thinks she loves him more than he loves her. He leaves to go to California to find his fortune, and she follows him. She enlists her uncle’s associate, the Chinese cook on the ship he was sailing, Tao Ch’ien, to help her leave. She stows away to California to search for Joaquin.

Ms. Hen thinks the characters in this novel are realistic. Everyone is interesting, and they all have a story. From Miss Rose to her two brothers, to the maid to Tao, they seem to Ms. Hen to have been real people that could have existed somewhere in the world. The novel is also well plotted. Certain points along the way are turning points, when the action changes and the story becomes something else. Minor characters are introduced, but pop out because they have so much color, such as Joe Bonecrusher, or Lola Montez, the famous courtesan.

This is a novel about love, but not about love that makes a person happy, rather that makes a person miserable. Several characters have a difficult time with love, and have suffered from aches of the heart. Eliza wants to find Joaquin, but her journey is painful to her. She thought she would end up in one place, but she ended up in a completely different place than she imagined she would.

There are several mentions of chickens in this novel, as there usually are in Allende’s tales. Tao is thinking about the prostitutes from China that end up in San Francisco, and he ponders, “They awaited disaster in their cribs, exactly as a chicken in its coop at the market: that was their destiny.” Ms. Hen pities the prostitutes from China; they barely have hope to survive, much like chickens at the market.

Ms. Hen adored this novel. She thinks it’s a perfect book to read near Valentine’s Day; it's about how people struggle with love, and are tortured and suffer because love and existence in itself can be terrible. The world is primarily horrendous, but sometimes it’s not that bad, though Ms. Hen tends to think people who are happy don’t see the whole picture, and only choose to see what they want. L

Ms. Hen reviews The Overstory

Ms. Hen under a tree

The Overstory

Richard Powers

W. W. Norton & Company

2018

Ms. Hen decided to read this because her hen-sister had a copy, since she likes to buy books, but does not always read them. Ms. Hen knew this novel was about trees, but that’s all she knew. It won the Pulitzer Prize last year.

This novel starts out seemingly as a book of short stories. The reader is introduced to each character separately, and learns about that person’s life. There is a family in Iowa with a giant chestnut tree in their yard, a young half Chinese woman who grows up to be an engineer, a Vietnam vet, a married couple consisting of a patent lawyer and a court stenographer, a scientist, a video game designer, and more.

As Ms. Hen read the second section, some of the characters come together to be activists to fight for the endangered trees in California. Two of the characters stay high up in a redwood for a year to protest the lumber companies cutting down trees. A plan is made to do guerilla environmentalism; a crime is committed, covered up, and then hidden for years.

The characters in this novel are excellent, they are like real people who are full of pathos, and have passion about their chosen field. Patricia Westerford, the scientist, lives a troubled life; when she was young she wrote an article in a journal about how trees communicate with each other, and is ostracized by the scientific community. She finds a group of scientists in the forest while she is working as a ranger, and her career is reinvigorated. The other characters in the novel read her book about trees, and are moved by it. She is a beacon that the others in the novel look towards to uncover the truth about trees and their existence on the planet.

Ms. Hen liked this book, even though it was extremely long. There were times when she was reading when she lost track of the characters, because there are so many, and the narrative keeps bouncing back and forth to each one in the latter sections of the novel. It took Ms. Hen a long time to read this novel. She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with long books, but they are time consuming. She likes to read a book a week, but with one like this, that’s not possible.

This novel contains a lot of philosophy and science together. It can be eye-opening to people who never think of trees as important. Ms. Hen likes trees, and she lives in an area where there are a lot, but she is embarrassed to admit that she does not know the names of all the trees. She doesn’t know the difference between a spruce and a Douglas fir. She decided she will try to learn the names of the trees in her area.

Ms. Hen recommends this novel, but she thinks that if someone reads this, they should have large chunks of time dedicated to reading it, and not read in short bursts like she does. Ms. Hen reads a lot on the train, and during her lunch break, so she does not have ample time. But to learn about a world where people care about trees and where the earth is headed is wonderful because we can see a different perspective, not necessarily a positive one, but a beautiful one.

Ms. Hen, enjoying nature