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Loading... Hideous Kinkyby Esther Freud
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  soylentgreen23 | Sep 6, 2009 |  A very interesting journey of two young daughters and their mother who travel from London to Morocco to only be turned away as an "undesirable". The set off from there looking for an adventure, never really settling anywhere for too long. The young girls turn the table and try to impose rules and a sense of structure on their mother that she should be imposing on them. The characters and sceneries all blend into a single lovely, colorful tapestry. (  ) sunfi | Apr 28, 2009 | This book really appealed to my sense of creativity, it lets you escape in a way that all people from traditional backgrounds at times tend to dream about. The book was much better than the film, although the cast were not the let down. (  ) susanpenter | Apr 24, 2009 | Impeccably told from a young child's perspective - that of an innocent, accepting life as it presents itself, not seeing what we see, but seeing what we do not. Set in Morocco, mostly Marrakech, it was a perfect book to take on a trip there. (  ) triscuit | Mar 19, 2009 | A mother and her two daughters move to Morrocco on the hippie trail in the 1970s, where they led an unconventional life. The story is told from the point of view of the youngest child, so it is told with a degree of naivety and wonder. However, I wasn't that convinced by this - it didn't come across as an authenic child's voice all of the time. I also struggled to feel any sympathy for the bohemian mother. (  ) sanddancer | Oct 29, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0880015934, Paperback)Hideous Kinky begins as a small, cheerful autobiographical novel following Thurber's variation on Wordsworth: "Humor is emotional chaos recollected in tranquillity." In the mid-1960s, two girls, ages 5 and 7, travel with their mother from London to Marrakech. Also along for the ride are John, Mum's boyfriend, and Maretta, John's wife. Though the author is a descendant of Sigmund Freud, the title of her first book has little to do with the pleasure principle. Instead, it is the only phrase the sisters have heard Maretta speak, one that quickly becomes an all-purpose epithet: "One of the shepherds whistled and the dogs slung to the ground. Bea raised an eyebrow as she passed me. 'Hideous kinky,' she whispered." Esther Freud's vocabulary and tone veer easily from the childlike to the more sophisticated, particularly when she recounts speech or circumstances beyond a child's comprehension.Once the group arrives in Marrakech, John and Maretta split off, and Mum hooks up with various men and pursues spirituality. The children, meanwhile, want nothing more than to be normal--or at least not to be so embarrassed by their mother's Islamic fervor: "'Oh Mum, please...' I was prepared to beg. 'Please don't be a Sufi.'" In Hideous Kinky, people appear and disappear with little reason or explanation. Though most of the characters are differentiated by one outstanding feature, Bilal, the itinerant builder and magician's apprentice who becomes one of Mum's lovers, is more complex. The narrator loves and trusts him from the start, and when she asks him if he will eventually return to England with them, "Bilal closed his eyes and began to hum along with Om Kalsoum, whose voice crackled and wept through a radio in the back of the café." Hideous Kinky is curiously divided. The first half is a lark. The girls explore Marrakech, picking up the language and even passing themselves off as beggars. The family's only worries are about money, and these are soon cured by the next bank draft from their father. But the second half is more melancholy. Mum's religious zeal becomes rather less endearing, and as the girls' adventures turn more dangerous, local rituals and customs begin to lose their charm: "I didn't like to think about the camel festival. The camel, garlanded in flowers, collected us from our house in the Mellah, and we had followed it out of the city and high into the mountains in a procession of singing." The parade ends, however, with the animal's beheading. "Occasionally I looked at Bea to see if she was running over these events like I was, the sound effects living their own life behind her eyes, but she gave nothing away." In the end, Hideous Kinky is a novel less about an exotic country seen through an innocent's eyes than about family, about having a deeply embarrassing mother, an older sister who does everything before you, and a distant father. It escapes sentimentality through simplicity: "Bilal was my Dad. No one denied it when I said so." The author, her sister, and her mother spent two years in Morocco, and while Esther Freud may not have invented her subject, she has re-created it with a light touch and delicate irony. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:23 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
I've always thought that it would be nice to drop out of the 'rat race' and go and live somewhere just with myself and the people I met along the way. That's really the idea here, only the drop-out in 'Hideous Kinky' takes her two young children with her, in an act of great irresponsibility that becomes more and more apparent as the plot progresses.
The story is narrated in wonderfully poetic fashion by the youngest of the two children. Ostensibly only five or so years old, she is able to capture even the smallest detail of the food, language, people and places that she encounters; get past this conceit and you will enjoy the book tremendously. (