Hideous Kinky
Esther Freud
Synopsis
This novel is about a feckless young mother and her two daughters
in Morocco in the 1960s. While mum immerses herself in the
Sufi religion, the children begin to rebel: Bea insists on
going to school while the five-year old narrator dreams of
mashed potato.
First lines
It wasn't until we were halfway through France that
we noticed Maretta wasn't talking. She sat very still in the
back of the van and watched us all with bright eyes.
Published reviews
[This book] has a delightful lightness of being. It springs
from the child's acceptance of whatever comes... Beggars,
shepherds, innkeepers, idiots, dubious Moroccan and eccentric
European ladies are funny and appealing and seen with affection,
and so are Mum and determined, tyrannical Bea. The child is
unquestioning, but the story is told by an older self (not
like Catcher in the Rye). So there is scope for an
undertow of irony. It is a gentle one: in fact, it may be
only in the reader's mind - Hideous Kinky is a first
novel, straight and unexperimental. But it's not naive; it
is written with the art that conceals art. Of course it is
autobiographical. What will Esther Freud's next novel be like?
The Times Literary Supplement
The decision to go 'home' seems more like a way to end a
book than a way to end a story. Indeed, there are a couple
of nettling discrepancies in this very interesting tale. For
one thing, the narrative seems overly dependent on the promising
device of its title. The wordplay throughout the text is subtle
and tactile, but it is rarely turned up to the pitch that
those two twisted words suggest. Hideous Kinky's sense
of place and its calmly eccentric characters are enough to
hold the book together, but only just: at times, it seems
the writer is afraid of getting the reader lost in a world
that's merely colorful. In the end, though, we can't get lost
enough.
Voice Literary Supplement
Told from a 5-year-old's point of view, . . . [this[ novel
by Esther Freud (an actress who is the great-granddaughter
of Sigmund Freud and the daughter of the artist Lucien Freud),
has a matter-of-factly whimsical tone that neatly captures
a child's acceptance of bizarre circumstances. . . . [Maretta's]
vocabulary has been reduced to two words: 'hideous' and 'kinky.'
This becomes the girls' refrain, a giddy mantra invoked to
shield them from the nonsensical adult world. . . . The book
evocatively renders the breathless static of vagabond life,
and the way a quest for meaning can become an escape from
freedom.
The New York Times Book Review
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