Were you also taken by the title of this post? This is not a book about a hideous kink, actually, it turns out. But the cover of the book shows a wistful looking Kate Winslet in a head covering, a vaguely North African tableau, and the announcement of the movie version. I haven’t seen the movie, but I think I have some ideas of what the movie is like. If I am right, it’s a weird perversion of the book. If I am wrong, well it has that kind of Miramax mid90s look to it, so I can maybe be forgiven.
So the novel is told from the perspective of a five year old girl (though the narration is entirely too mature and adult for that, so I choose to read it as an older woman looking back at her childhood) who’s in Morocco with her older sister and her mother. They are all English (and this will come up) and their mother is going through some kind spiritual and existential crisis in the novel and has taken them to a place that perhaps will allow for some kind of spiritual reawakening. It also turns out that one of the more accepting places they can find in within a brothel. So that’s where they’re staying.
The novel then places them in various cultural exchanges throughout their time there as the two young girls try to make sense of their world, their heritage, and their mother, as she also tries to make sense of the world around her.
It’s an interesting remix of a lot of British travelers in foreign lands story, because the bohemianism of the mother is called out, not in a very conservative way, but in a kind of lie in your bed and deal with it. It’s not the kind of novel where cultural trespasses lead to violence (and there’s lots of those) but to confusion and alienation.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Hideous-Kinky-Esther-Freud/dp/0140174125/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=hideous+kinky&qid=1565005708&s=gateway&sr=8-2)