A good read, made into a film starring Kate Winslet.

From Amazon.com ...
"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."


BOOKRING PARTICIPANTS

1. Minx2012 - London, UK
2. Balham - London, UK
3. Honeyy - London, UK
4. book-bugger - RI, USA
5. Blacksheeps99 - Austria
6. Mymlan - Finland
7. Scism - Adelaide, Australia
8. Funkybamboozle - Sydney, NSW, Australia (Post back to me)

Released on Tuesday, February 10, 2004 at ... by mail :) in Sent to a fellow BookCrosser, Bookring Controlled Releases.

I do like getting books in the post. It's why Amazon make so much money out of me.
Thank you GlasgowGal for helping keep me out of their clutches for a little while...

Hideous Kinky is one of those books about which you hear a certain buzz, but don't know much more about.
In my case the buzz was because I knew it had been made into a film with Kate Winslet (who I adore), and I knew it was written by Esther Freud, descendant of Sigmund.
So reading it was a really nice surprise, because I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, and the telling of the story, from the remembered perspective of the four-year-old younger daughter as she, her mum and older sister trek around Morocco, is marvellous.

A book which, for once, deserved the murmurs of approval I'd heard.

I recieved hideous kniky yesterday and have already read about half of it! Thanks to Glasgowgal for this bookring & to minx2012 for sending it on so quickly.

CAUGHT IN LONDON ENGLAND

Sorry - the last entry was from me - I forgot to log in.

This book reminded me of nagging my older sister to tell me made up stories when I was a child! I enjoyed it very much, the story is very well told. It is interesting to read in the other reviews here that Ester Freud spent some of her childhood in Morocco as I thought it brought Morocco alive.

Received Hideous Kinky today

I have seen the film so looking forward to reading the book. Watch this space.......

I thoroughly enjoyed Hideous Kinky. As a bit of a closet hippie, the book made me long to throw on a kaftan and head off to Morocco....

sent to book-bugger today.

Arrived today! Thanks Honeyy!! And thanks Glasgowgal for the ring....... I have this and The Loop, but I will do my best to get them both moving again soon.

Happy reading!

I enjoyed this book very much. It definitely stirs up feeling of wanderlust.

I apologize as I thought this was a book that I had taken care of and gotten moving again. My mistake. It has restarted its journey today.

Hurray! Hurray!

This little book finally made its way to Vienna (after been returned to book-bugger once). Thanks a lot to GlasgowGal for starting this ray and to Book-bugger for posting it twice.

I have to finish one other ring-book but will probably start reading this one in two or three days.

I loved the movie and I´m not surprised that I loved the book too. A great story! Will be off to the next one soon.

Posted two days ago - it´s on ity way to Finland. Enjoy!

First of all, I'm sorry, I received the book already two weeks ago - well, it will be on it's way again soon.

It was a nice read, even though I think that the view point of a child was not always captured as it could have been. What pleased me about the book had to do with that though: everything was quite easy and self evident, the way things used to be when you were a child. Let's go live in Morocco, let's move in with some new people, if there's no money let's beg for it. I had to wake myself up from time to time, and remind myself that in a similar situation as a grownup I would be very stressed and fearfull.

The book will be on it's way to Scism tomorrow, I hope it makes it quick enough all the way down-under.

Whoops! This book arrived two days ago, and I was so keen to start reading that I forgot to journal it! I'm almost half way through at the moment, and although I'm enjoying it, I'm finding myself a bit bemused by the characters. I imagine I'll finish it within a few days (it's much thinner than I thought), and send it off on the next leg of its journey.

Well, I've finally finished it, and I must say I'm not as thrilled with it as everyone else on the ring appears to be. To be honest, I feel a bit as if I just don't "get it". I kept waiting for there to be some sort of explanation that would throw light on the rest of the story, but it never came. I think the feeling I had half-way through the book of being a bit bemused never quite left me.

But nevertheless, I'm glad I read it. I haven't seen the movie, but I think I might now - maybe it will make more sense to me! And, if I remember correctly, the movie was filmed in outback Australia, so I feel at least some patriotic duty to see it!

Thanks GlasgowGal for sharing this one with all of us! I will send it off on it's next leg asap.

After checking with GlasgowGal, I asked around on the BCAUS forum to see if any other Aussies wanted to read this before it makes its final journey home. Funkybamboozle took up the offer, so I'm mailing it off to her this week.

Yah ! I received this in the mail today. Its quite thin which means I can put it to the top of my tbr pile. Should be finished by the end of the week.

Thought I would read this rather quickly...but have had some trouble getting into it....which meant I read something else (actually 4 other books). Ill try gain this week, and post it back, regardless, before the month is out

This is disgusting!! I have had this book on Mt TBR for so long and I still havent finished it!! I have found the book quite difficult to become enthusiastic about and cant really get into it. I have emailed Glasgowgirl for her address to mail it back. Sorry for the hold up!

Mailing back to Scotland with a few small thank yous for waiting sooo long!!

This book has made it home safe and sound after its round the world adventures. Thanks so much to everyone who looked after it, and especial thanks to Funkybamboozle for the Cherry Ripes in the parcel. I now have to try and keep them away from DB who likes the sound of them too! Thanks for feeding my addiction!

:-)

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