Sea House [Paperback]

Esther Freud (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2004

The architect Klaus Lehmann loves his wife, Elsa, with a passion that continues throughout their married life, despite long periods of separation. Almost half a century after Lehmann's death in the village of Steerborough, a young woman, Lily, arrives to research his life and work. Poring over Klaus' letters to Elsa, Lily pieces together the story of their lives. And alone in her rented cottage by the sea, she begins to sense an absence in her own life that may not be filled by simply going home.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Painter Lucian's daughter, Sigmund's great-granddaughter and an accomplished novelist herself (Hideous Kinky), Freud invokes her father's family history in this splendidly written, evocative novel. Inspired by the letters of her grandfather, the architect Ernst Freud, she weaves an elegantly paced, double-stranded narrative set in the English coastal village of Steerborough. In the present, 20-something grad student Lily retreats to Steerborough for the summer with a bundle of letters that architect Klaus Lehman wrote to his wife, Elsa. Her story alternates with that of a group of German-Jewish emigres, including Klaus, Elsa and the deaf painter Max Meyer, who summer in Steerborough in 1953. While Lily pores over Klaus's adoring but paternalistic, bullying letters, she and her workaholic architect boyfriend Nick, living in London, are nearly incommunicado. "The men she knew didn't seem to feel the need to so utterly possess their women," Lily muses, somewhat regretfully. Between infrequent, strained visits from Nick, Lily makes a pretense at work, suns, swims and befriends the little girls next door—and their virile, working-class father. Freud depicts postwar Steerborough from the point of view of Max and his hostess, Gertrude Jilks, an English child psychoanalyst and friend of his recently deceased sister, Kaethe. As Max hungers for the beautiful Elsa while mourning Kaethe and the immeasurable loss of his life and family in Germany—a subtext Freud renders all the more powerful with slow, subtle revelations—he paints every house in the village, creating a scroll that Lily will one day discover on exhibition. The novel's setting is smalltown, but its thematic scope is generous: from Old World jealous love to modern-day commitment issues, art, psychoanalysis, dislocation and yearning for home. Though the culmination of the love stories feels too deliberately plotted, Freud has constructed her novel with beautiful precision.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

In Freud's fifth novel, a young woman arrives in a small English seacoast village to research a thesis about a German architect who lived and worked there. While poring over his passionate letters to his wife (letters that raise questions about her own relationship with a man back in London), she becomes involved with the fractious family next door. Interspersed through this narrative is one concerning events decades earlier, when an artist visiting from London starts to make paintings of every house in the village and falls for the architect's wife. A dreamlike atmosphere pervades, rather at the expense of vivid characterization, but Freud's gift for natural description is such that she manages to turn the village's seaside topography into a sentient being, with its own stores of memory and malice.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (April 29, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0141026545
• ISBN-13: 978-0141011073
• ASIN: 0141011076
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lovely, romantic, and touching, April 20, 2004

By 

Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sea House: A Novel (Hardcover)

Though the twin stories took a while to clarify themselves in this reader's mind, once they did, the novel was quietly hypnotic as it wove together themes of loss, love, and historic tragedy. Set in a seaside English town today and in the early 50s, the book is suffused by a sense of isolation and longing, of human insignificance in the face of the limitless waters that can erase whole cities over time. The prose was beautiful and I read many passages over to savor the author's vision.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "I'd like to be allowed to dream a bit, to plan", October 3, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sea House: A Novel (Hardcover)

Love, art, and memory are the central themes of this fluid and multi-layered novel from Esther Freud. With its duel narrative, its epistolary structure, and its readiness to easily slip from the past to the present, The Sea House paints an indelible and quite beautiful portrait of a small English seaside community in Suffolk; a community that affects people from different generations in unexpected and quite life-changing ways.

Lily is twenty-seven and lives in London with her boyfriend, Nick. But when she visits the small seaside village of Steerborough, a few hours away from London, she is immediately entranced. Lily is pursuing a degree in architecture, while also working as a waitress at a restaurant in Covent Garden. She's been working on her thesis, whose subject is deceased architect Klaus Lehmann, a former resident of Steerborough.

When Lily moves to Steerborough and rents a cottage to continue work on her thesis, she takes with her a stack of letters from Klaus Lehmann to his wife, Elsa. The letters chronicle the periods during which Lehmann and his wife lived apart. While Lily's research is supposed to be focused on Lehmann's work as an architect, the possessive love letters that Klaus wrote to Elsa before and after World War 11 quickly intrigue and engross her.

The angst ridden and desperate letters of love, force Lily to confront her own relationship with Nick, and she realizes that a return to London would be just too deleterious. Lily has not only come to doubt Nick, but also her own ambitions; she begins to feel that she's not cut out to be an architect and anguishes that after three years of training, she still doesn't know what to do. She's content to live in the present, just "drifting around."

The story drifts between Lily in the present day and back to 1953 when Klaus and Elsa where friends of Gertrude Jilks, a child psychoanalyst, and her friend Max Meyer, a deaf artist who is energetically painting a scroll of Steerborough. Much of the 1953 narrative is told from the point of view of Max, as he takes over the town, "muddling up traffic on the village's one street, peering through windows, examining borders, and choosing which house or cottage to paint next."

The opening of The Sea House is a little confusing as the abrupt changes in time from the past to the present may be somewhat hard to follow for some readers. But this reader recommends sticking with the story, because there are lots of surprising plot twists and turns and Freud's gorgeous descriptions of Steerborough's geography, weather, and natural beauty are unsurpassed. Just as Max paints his scroll of the town, Lily - along with the reader - experiences the same severe beauty almost half a century later. And although there are long stretches where nothing happens, it hardly matters, because the rich and detailed atmosphere of quite, domestic life in this little seaside village is enough to enthrall. The Sea House is a clever and subtle story, proving to be an immensely satisfying read about art, desire, and the complexities of personal relationships. Mike Leonard October 04.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Normal for Suffolk, January 16, 2006

By 

D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sea House: A Novel (Hardcover)

It may unfair to Esther Freud to begin a review by pointing out that she is the great-granddaughter of you-know-who, but it would be unfair to the reader not to mention it, because one of the themes is the German-Jewish refugee experience in England and one of her characters is a psychoanalyst. The author adds to the relevance of her personal background by providing a list of acknowledgements at the end that almost suggests we have been reading a roman a clef.

There are two main settings, seaside communities on opposite shores of the North Sea. One is a meticulously described East Anglian village, Steerborough, the other a German island (which might actually be in the Baltic).

The two main plots are set 50 years apart in time. One is the story, set in the fifties, of a refugee architect, Klaus, and his wife, Elsa, the other is the story of Lily,a student of architectural history, who is studying the life and work of Klaus and worrying about her relationship with her London architect lover, Nick.

Several other plots are interlinked. Lily gets involved with Grae who is desperately trying to care for two young daughters, Emm and Arry, reminiscent of the wonderful ones in "Hideous Kinky," and who may or may not be the guilty party in his violent relationship with their mother. Elsa has an affair with the deaf artist Max, who is painting a panorama of Steerborough.

It sounds complicated, and there are many subtleties and nuances that will repay a second reading, but the characters are so well demarcated, their dialog is so realistic, and their actions flow so naturally from their personalities, that it is never hard to follow for pure entertainment.