Hideous Kinky [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Esther Freud (Author, Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1999

Seen through the eyes of a 5-year-old girl, this is the remarkable journey of two sisters living in Marrakesh during the late '60' with their well-meaning hippie mother. The charming story is sometimes disturbing as the children try to impose a discipline of sorts on their whimsical mother. In this semi-autobiographical novel, Esther Freud's skill as both writer and reader creates a quality of innocence that is both effortless and entirely convincing. 2 cassettes.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Audio Partners; Abridged edition (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1572700998
• ISBN-13: 978-1572700994
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,382,281 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully kinky and a little sad, September 18, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hideous Kinky: A Novel (Paperback)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very moving story., September 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Hideous Kinky: A Novel (Paperback)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seductive innocence seen through a child's eye!, June 11, 1998

By 

Reine des Coeurs "reine_des_coeurs" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Hideous Kinky (Paperback)

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.