Esther Freud

I returned to a novel that both Vicky and I truly loved when we both read it when it first came out. It’s the story of Thomas Maggs, a 12-year-old son of a drunken pub keeper in a small village on England’s Suffolk coast, as World War One begins. The regular slow pace of life there and then is beautifully reflected in Esther Freud’s writing. I originally wrote of the book that, “I would love to be able to carry the world that this novel created around in my mind, each and every show more day.” Another reader, the writer Ann Patchett said the following of the book was, “A compelling tale beautifully told, Mr. Mac and Me is as close to a perfect novel as anything I’ve read in a long time. I loved every page of it.”

Life changes for Thomas with the arrival of a mysterious couple, Charles Rennie McIntosh and wife Margaret. The Scottish architect, designer, and artist becomes a person of interest, as tensions with Germany continue to rise. The villagers are suspicious of the artistic couple, especially his habit of taking walks along the coast while always carrying his binoculars. Thomas has some suspicions about them, but he gets to know them as a kind and generous twosome. They both encourage Thomas to do more with his doodling and sketching. It a very curious friendship that develops.

The slow pace of village life changes drastically once the war with Germany breaks out and the troops being shipped out are passing through their streets on a regular basis. But just as the book’s short chapters pass by quickly, once a group of soldiers leave, the village almost returns to it peaceful and traditional pace of life—until the next group arrives.

Perfectly reflecting the feel of the story, Freud has Thomas along the shoreline in the following passage.
“I stand on the beach and tilt back my head and I count the few stars that have pierced the cloud. There are less than a dozen, although the longer I look the more I find, and I'm searching so hard that at first I don't notice the shadow of the Zeppelin, it's belly only slightly blacker than the cloud. I stand quite still. It's got me by the eye.”
I love the fascination with the airships, and the images seem almost benign, until Thomas realizes that they’re headed to attack London, and later they strafe and bomb the village with most likely leftover armaments from a London run.

I simply love the way this book tells its story. I learned more about McIntosh and this book also worked on so many levels telling its story of war, family, friendship, and trust. In the reverse of most reviews of her work, I will only tell you now that Esther Freud is indeed the great-granddaughter of Sigmund, and that her father was the famous painter, Lucian Freud, AND that she has written a wonderful book. 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