Esther Freud

This is the third Esther Freud novel I've read, and they just keep getting better and better. This one is my favourite to date, and definitely a recommended starting point if you've not read any of her work before. Esther Freud comes from some serious pedigree - her father is the painter Lucian Freud, and Sigmund Freud was her great-grandfather.

There's a wistfulness to her writing that I just love. Her protagonists often tend to be soul searchers who are looking for a combination of the show more right soul mate and their perfect corner in the world. I said in my recent review of her book The Wild that there was an evocative sense of place, and this is so true of The Sea House as well. If I was to compare her to another writer, I'd say perhaps Anita Brookner or Iris Murdoch (in terms of The Sea, the Sea anyway).

This novel tells two connecting stories set in the same sleepy English village by the sea but separated by 50 years. A reluctant student architect rents a house in the village to study the work of a Jewish German architect who had built a home for himself and his wife in the village after WWII. Whilst reading his passionate love letters to his wife Elsa, her awareness of the flaws in her own relationship back in London is heightened, and the gulf between her new life in the village and her old relationship throws up some serious questions about the future.

Meanwhile, we also discover the reality of the architect's relationship with his wife, told through the perspective of an artist who befriends the couple whilst spending the summer in the village as a distraction from his sister's death.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. The two interchanging stories worked well alongside each other, coming together in a satisfying conclusion, and the tension around the various relationships and passions played out wonderfully in the gentle backdrop of the idyllic seaside haven.

5 stars - a page-turner from the start. show less

A young English woman sets off on the hippie trail to Marrakech, accompanied by her two small daughters. The youngest, aged five, tells the story. Needless to say, it doesn’t go terribly well — the money soon runs out, the rest of the group drifts off back to Europe, Mum’s boyfriends come and go, spiritual quests get overtaken by the problems of finding food, clothes and accommodation.

Freud turns out to be very good at the young-child-narrator thing, which is a very difficult trick to show more pull off. She (mostly) manages to steer a safe course between the obvious hazards of being either twee or annoyingly knowing, and it’s quite easy to suspend disbelief and take this as a plausible picture, informed by Freud’s own childhood experiences, of what the world might look like from a five-year-old perspective, even when we know that it has all inevitably been filtered through hindsight and adult awareness. It’s often very funny as the airy impracticality of hippie culture is brought into confrontation with the serious life-skills of the local people, surviving in poverty in a difficult environment, and the child’s perspective actually turns out to be perfect because of the way she can enter into sympathy with people from very different cultures without any preconceived notions about them. show less

I did not have high hopes because I do not like the title and my copy has a terrible movie tie-in cover with an enormous picture of Kate Winslet on the front. I also knew it was told from the point of view of a small child, which never seems to work well. To my surprise, I actually really enjoyed this.

The narrator (age 5) and her sister, Bea (age 7), are dragged along on their hippie mother's adventure from London to Marrakech. In Marrakech, they are submerged in the culture as they tag show more along while their mother does what she wants and explores spiritualism. They are often hungry, dressed insufficiently, their health is seriously neglected, and they are put in dangerous situations as they follow their mother's whims. But, they also experience the beauty of the country they are in, enjoy the food, and meet some kind people along the way. Seeing Morocco through a five year old's eyes was a unique perspective and very effective.

Freud does several things right in this book. One is that though she does use the perspective of a five year old, she doesn't use a child's language. She does this just right, where you aren't annoyed by having to read little kid language, but you realize that the perspective is different than it would be from an adult (or even from the slightly older, more worldly sister). This book would have been absolutely intolerable to me if it was told from the selfish mother's point of view. Experiencing through the five year old's POV, who loves her mother, wants to please her mother, and just accepts what is happening as it comes, made the plot and all the mistakes the mother makes tolerable.

This is my second book by Esther Freud and I'm impressed. I'm going to continue reading her novels. show less

This novel entwines the stories of three Irish women living in London. Aoife leaves rural Ireland for London in the forties, and meets a pub owner who only wants to return and run a farm. They persevere and save through the war and its aftermath, sending their daughters to the safety of an Irish boarding school. Rosaleen flees to London in the sixties, falling deeply in love with a much older Jewish artist. And then there's Kate, also an artist, but forced to put her own ambitions on hold as show more her daughter is young and her partner prioritizes his music and his drinking over childcare.

At first, the book feels like three unconnected stories woven together, but Freud slowly reveals connections and parallels that unify the novel. The novel looks at the choices that women have been allowed to make over the years and how those choices, or lack of choice, form them. Freud is such a fine writer and has so fully developed each of her three protagonists, that I never felt frustrated when the novel switched from one to another. As each woman's story is told, it deepens the other stories as well, and in the end, all was pulled together into a single cohesive whole. I was impressed with Freud's writing and her skill in both telling a story and how well she developed her characters. I'll certainly be reading more by this author. show less