Description:
In her charming first novel, Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud explored a single year of her unsettled and unsettling childhood, instantly revealing her light touch with the serious. Even those who chose to scour the book for snatches of her famous father, the painter Lucian Freud, were struck by its comic strengths, compressed narrative, and preternatural ability to convey incidents and events that were well beyond the five-year-old narrator's comprehension. But when Freud's second, darker novel, Peerless Flats, was also drawn from life, some began to wonder if she was not forever condemned to repeat her past. Summer at Gaglow is her fine response to these doubters, even though a certain paintbrush-wielding pater is very much in evidence. The book opens in Germany in the summer of 1914, when the Great War's hostilities are still in the future. But at Gaglow, the Belgard family's summer estate, hostilities are rather more in evidence. In a brief, beautifully written chapter, Freud fills in the clan's jealousies, secrets, and subterfuges. The three girls are always furious with--and surprisingly cruel to--Marianna, their mother (who takes comfort in her fleet of whippets), and rather in love with their governess. Fräulein Schulze, on the other hand, is secretly involved with their 21-year-old soldier brother. Freud has a keen eye for instability, and a gift for expressing it indirectly. In 12 pages, she delineates several lives and the prospect of millions of deaths. The second chapter opens with a short, sharp shock--cutting from the past, and the third person, to the present: "Sometimes while my father painted I stared up at the huge beast of my body, my gargantuan breasts, my widened thighs, and tried to find the charcoal outline of my former self." Within a few pages, however, the connection is made as the artist tells Sarah that, as descendants of Marianna Belgard, his maternal grandmother, they are entitled to some property in East Germany. From then on, Freud alternates between Gaglow and London. In the present, Sarah strives to learn more of the family history that her father has done his best to forget. In the past, war and lies take their toll. Throughout, the reader is always in the enviable position of knowing slightly more, and of wanting to fill in the silences and obviate certain deceits. Though it would be wrong to call Summer at Gaglow panoramic, it is a kaleidoscopic, unsentimental, and always unpredictable exploration of home truths. --Kerry Fried
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