Esther Freud: Hideous Kinky

[novella]

Just finished this book by Esther Freud, great granddaughter of Sigmund and daughter of painter Lucien Freud. (Also, her sister is designer Bella Freud.)

The author pulls off something amazing, writing a memoir of traveling around Marrakesh and other parts of North Africa with her hippie mother in the 1960s, when the author was only 5 years old. She manages to write a very immediate story full of experience, without any of the moral or cultural or psychological judgments that might have come along with such a trip.

It’s a much better book than I anticipated, and I understand it’s far better than the movie, though I haven’t seen that. In some ways it reminds me of the early part of Memoirs of a Geisha, when the protagonist of that is so young that she merely observes the world around her without all the filters that come later with knowledge and want.

In a way, Hideous Kinky is insubstantial, like a taste of something intriguing, because the author doesn't presume any insight into the adult world. On the other hand, it's so sharply observed that it doesn't matter--it's a very pleasant and poignant experience.

 

[Ronny]

The book does sound good, I tried to watch the movie and couldn't stick with it. It was one of those movies that you weren't really sure what was going on or why you were being shown this, like you needed to be familiar with the story first. Maybe I'll try the book instead.

 

[wilderness]

I have only ever seen the movie...i wasnt aware that it was a book! but i really loved it as a film. It never said what the meaning of hidioius Kinky was, so that annoyed me a bit. But good otherwise. The title is resally offputting though.
Lani

 

[novella]

It's explained early on in the book that Hideous and Kinky are two words the young sisters latch on to and use to describe something cool and weird. They use the phrase 'hideous kinky' several times in the book. I think this may have been lost in the movie because, as I understand it, the movie was rewritten to put the mother at the center of the narrative, whereas the book is written solely from the youngest girl's point of view. I read that this change in viewpoint really makes the movies completely different from the book.