Product Description

The debut novel from the author of Summer at Gaglow, called "a near-seamless meshing of family feeling, history and imagination" by the New York Times Book Review. Escaping gray London in 1972, a beautiful, determined mother takes her daughters, aged 5 and 7, to Morocco in search of adventure, a better life, and maybe love. Hideous Kinky follows two little English girls -- the five-year-old narrator and Bea, her seven-year-old sister -- as they struggle to establish some semblance of normal life on a trip to Morocco with their hippie mother, Julia. Once in Marrakech, Julia immerses herself in Sufism and her quest for personal fulfillment, while her daughters rebel -- the older by trying to recreate her English life, the younger by turning her hopes for a father on a most unlikely candidate.

Shocking and wonderful, Hideous Kinky is at once melancholy and hopeful. A remarkable debut novel from one of England's finest young writers, Hideous Kinky was inspired by the author's own experiences as a child. Esther Freud, daughter of the artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, lived in Marrakech for one and a half years with her older sister Bella and her mother. Hideous Kinky is now a major motion picture starring Kate Winslet ("Titanic," "Sense and Sensibility").

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93462 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-01
• Released on: 1999-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.com Review
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.

From Publishers Weekly
In this semi-autobiographical novel based on her own childhood, Freud (Summer at Gaglow), tells the story of Julia, a hippie mother traveling with her young daughters, Lucia and Bea, through North Africa in the 1960s. (The girls, true to their impish nature, love to use the words "hideous" and "kinky.") Events are described through the eyes of five-year-old Lucia, and therefore rely more intensely on sensations than on concrete details. This experiential quality translates well to audio in Freud's tenderly evocative reading. As the family travels from Tangier to Marrakech, by rail and sometimes hitchhiking, Lucia gives her child's-eye impressions of street performers, beggars and holy men. As audio, the telling is richly atmospheric and exotic, with a strong undercurrent of wistfulness that comes from a little girl always questioning her mother's actions. Based on the 1992 Pillar hardcover. (Apr.) FYI: A movie based on the book, directed by Gillies MacKinnon and starring Kate Winslet as Julia, recently opened in theaters.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A young English child recounts travels and a lengthy sojourn in North Africa with her freedom-loving mother and security-seeking older sister--in the fiction debut of a London-born actress. The narrator--who turns five during the novel--has been born into such chaos that she takes it for granted. (The book's title comes from the only words spoken by the mentally and physically declining wife of one of Mum's boyfriends; unaware of the woman's suffering, the narrator and sister Bea turn Hideous! Kinky! into magic words for a game of tag.) In Morocco, the girls make friends with beggars, run about barefoot, dirty, and caftan-clad; they also eat hashish candy, live with the poor, have henna hair treatments from prostitute neighbors, travel with Bilal--the street entertainer who becomes Mum's lover--and go to Algeria (Bea refuses, so Mum simply leaves her behind) to seek Sufi wisdom. Throughout here, Mum repeatedly puts her family at risk--but without worse consequence than Bea seeking stability with a missionary and the narrator hoping Bilal will be her real father; the adventure therefore ends up seeming rather benign. The narrative seems too detailed, logical, and rich in cultural information to come from a five-year-old, while the more credible lack of perspective blunts any real understanding of the impact on the child. The potential tension between the girl's matter-of-fact account and the reader's presumed alarm rarely materializes. Best as travelogue: a fluently written inside view of Morocco. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

A very moving story.
This book is interesting from beginning to end -- a wonderful story that is very enjoyable to read. The perspective from which it is written (through the eyes of a five-year-old) enables us to see and experience life a little differently, and that is unique. It is well written, and the characters are all richly drawn and memorable. I found it to be touching, funny, sad in parts, and very moving. I read a lot of books, and have not come across such a strikingly good one in quite a while. I didn't want it to end.

Seductive innocence seen through a child's eye!
This is absolutely enchanting book full of colors and spice, showing us not only the adventures of a mother and her daughters on a trek of self discovery through Morocco, but also the panorama of a country that was the Mecca of the hippie movement of the 70's. It is a vivid recollection of said adventure, seen from the point of view of a 5 year old child.

Wonderfully kinky and a little sad
Freud used the facts of her own bizarre childhood to craft this kinky and pretty darned sad novel of Julia, a hippie mom rambling through North Africa with her two young daughters in those hazy, lazy Hippie years of the 60s. The story is told exclusively through the voice of 5yo Lucia, so the whole odd event is full of images, hints, suspicious, limited observations, and wishes more than on concrete facts. Mom's lovers and the neighborhood street performers, missionaries, beggars, hashish, henna, and holy men add to the exotic atmosphere of this book. The child is mother to the adult for most of the movie, and Lucia yearns for nothing so much as a normal mum to take care of her and send her to school and help her with her homework. Instead, Mum goes off to seek Sufi enlightenment - and comes very close to misplacing one of her children forever.