Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, except it is only 2969th on The Greatest Books of All Time, but what matters most in this corner, it is still one of my Top 200 Favorites, after a second reading; you have thousands of reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/08/do-you-have-any-suggestions-how-to-make.html
Hideous
Kinky by Esther Freud is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, except it
is only 2969th on The Greatest Books of All Time, but what matters
most in this corner, it is still one of my Top 200 Favorites, after a second
reading; you have thousands of reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned
and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/08/do-you-have-any-suggestions-how-to-make.html
10 out of 10
Hideous
Kinky was mesmerizing https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/08/hideous-kinky-by-esther-freud-10-out-of.html the first time, and I was somewhat
skeptical for the second encounter, especially given that Changing Places by
David Lodge was no longer the euphoric experience, when tested for a second
time, last week
Esther Freud
was the ‘daughter of acclaimed (if absent in the childhood of the girl, at
least as depicted in the opus) painter Lucien Freud and great- granddaughter of
the titanic Sigmund Freud’, but you would not say that, when considering the
harsh, at times appalling period that we contemplate with some horror
There are a
few things to say about this, first that this is fiction (based on life),
second that, despite the pains, deprivations, and despair, there are miraculous
events, the narrator, who was a child at the time when they travel through
Marocco and Algeria, is ebullient also, this is a bildungsroman, I would say it
reminds me of
The
Sheltering Sky https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-sheltering-sky-by-paul-bowles-is.html another chef d’oeuvre, which is
about the experiences of Europeans travelling through Africa – for that matter,
I should mention Heart of Darkness, An Instant in the Wind, Black Mischief and
others – but there is more…
Bernardine
Coverley was the real mother of Esther Freud, her replica in the novel is quite
a character, she wants to ‘enter’ Sufism, meditates, and I am not sure how we
would qualify her as a parent, some of the things that happen would have her
children taken away – Fjord, winner of the Palmes d’Or at the Cannes Festival
comes to mind
It is a
balancing act, and that makes the narrative more compelling, the children
suffer from hunger at times, Bea has an infection, they worry that all her
teeth might fall, there are no facilities in some of the places where they
stay, but they grow stronger, also, the natives, including children, all face
the same privations
An Instant in
The Wind https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/08/an-instant-in-wind-by-andre-brink-was.html takes place at the other end of
Africa, but the main personages there face death for most of the time we are
with them, as readers, besides, the problem with money that they have in
Hideous Kinky, well, we have it here
At the end,
I must say that Hideous Kinky is now part of my ritual, just like the two girls
like the expression, I find it elating, it there with medicine, from Little Big
Man, and adjectival, from The True History of The Kelly Gang https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/10/true-history-of-kelly-gang-by-peter.html
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