Romance of Elsewhere

May 15, 2017
Novelist Freed (The Servants’ Quarters), an English professor at UC Davis, wrestles with “the horror of being stuck where one lives” and, in opposition to that horror, her attachment to the comfort, intimacy and pride of home in this collection of personal essays that spans both decades and continents. The essays, all previously published, recount her childhood and adolescence in her native South Africa and her experiences as an exchange student and young bride in New York City, a visiting professor in Texas, and a long-time resident of Northern California, an inveterate traveler all the while. Wise, evocative and darkly humorous, Freed covers Disneyland, ecotourism, lovers, servants, her wariness of milestone-birthday celebrations and the accompanying “hysteria for public confession,” writers who are able to blossom in old age, and other topics. Particularly memorable are her essays about South Africa, as well as those about her upper-middle-class, mildly eccentric family’s place in it. This collection evokes different moods, different eras, and different places with an astute, frank, and pitch-perfect narrator.

June 15, 2017

For award-winning author Freed (The Curse of the Appropriate Man; Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home), home is two places: America, where she lives, and South Africa, where she was born. This collection contains 20 previously published essays on writing, writers, and "somewhere else." "Multiple Choice" examines the idea of being committed, whether to a marriage, a job, or an airline ticket. "It's a Small, Unnatural World" describes the promise of a trip to Disneyland with a nine-year-old. "Honkey, Napoleon, & the Empress Woo" explains Freed's relationship with her family's housekeeper, who loved reading and a puppy named Honkey. "Locked In" reveals the fear of a small California community with a rapist on the loose. VERDICT Freed presents her life from many sides: Jewish child raised in South Africa, overdressed teenage exchange student among the hippies in New York City; cancer patient facing mortality; woman in the middle of her life alone in America, beautifully weaving all into thoughtful essays about life and writing.--Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2017
An offbeat world tour with a not-quite-innocent abroad.Novelist and essayist Freed (Emerita, English/Univ. of California; The Last Laugh, 2017, etc.) isn't the type to get hung up on wondering "should I stay or should I go?" She gets the urge for going, and she's gone. "As it happens," she writes, "I am at my most suggestible on the subject of belonging, because I am not much good at it." Wanderlust is what ties these funny and astute personal essays together; the book is about what it means to have an insatiable hunger for experience. Freed begins in, and frequently returns to, her homeland of South Africa, where she was born into a theatrical family amid the apartheid-era white bourgeoisie. She writes of the surface tension of revolt and how a mutual sense of distrust infects communication. A Zulu phrase book, for example, delivers commands with a Biblical tone, "intended to communicate to the servant that God is speaking." Freed skewers an ecotourist camp where, she notes with a twinge of glee, a lioness devoured a camper. Maybe, she reasons, "had the lioness not lost her natural fear of Man while recovering from her capture experience, she might never have come anywhere near the camp." In between visiting many countries over many years, Freed deals with love and mortality. There's cancer, which transforms shopping: "I wonder whether I was drawn to soaps and gels because, unlike, say, a belt or a pair of shoes, they could be counted upon not to outlast me." There's infidelity: "I could not bear the thought of a life spent repeating itself in virtue." And there is, finally, the clock ticking, as she considers how aging affects writing. This is travel literature as memoir, drolly covering the scope of a restless creative life.

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May 1, 2017
Even as a teenager, South African Freed possessed what her mother called itchy feet. She schemed to become an exchange student, dreaming she'd find real life, but her version included lolling on yachts and wearing strapless evening gowns. Instead, she ended up in Greenwich, Connecticut, but found ways to escape into Manhattan, where the thrum of city life enchanted her. Freed's (The Servants' Quarters, 2009) collection of (mostly) previously published essays runs a wide gamut. She revisits Disneyland to find it a tired unreality. She wonders whether menopause is a cause for celebration (it isn't). She realizes that Americans are uncomfortable with the notion of having hired help. In one essay, she arrives in South Africa on the eve of Nelson Mandela's release from prison to discover the notion of black brotherhood curiously missing. Instead, the whole country seems ill at ease. Fans of Freed will enjoy reading (or rereading) these short works. Readers unfamiliar with her may find her, by turns, discerning or dyspeptic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)