Hugo Hamilton à tous

Many thanks for your message. I am in the mountains at the moment, right in the middle of finishing a book. I will try and answer the questions as soon as I can. IN the meantime I look forward to seeing you all in June. 

Very best wishes, Hugo

ARTICLE CRITIQUE – Zoé et Jehan

Avez-vous déjà lu un livre (in)différent ?

C'est ce que nous propose Hugo Hamilton, avec toute l’audace et l’ignorance d'un enfant. De sa plume décousue, agrémentée de métaphores délicates, il expose son histoire. L’histoire de cette famille atypique, anormale, luttant pour la survie d’un langage, d’une culture, d’une différence.

Il nous transporte de Dublin à Berlin, il sait nous guider avec douceur, calme et détresse, le tout avec une simplicité qui se révèle n'être qu'apparente. Animé par les joies et les douleurs de l’enfance, de la cuisson des gâteaux aux coups de bâtons, ce livre vous réserve une lecture aussi violente que sucrée. Il dévoile la cruauté, l’absurdité et l’innocence de l’enfance, la peur et l’incompréhension, les moments d’amour et les moments d’insouciance.

Issu d’un père nationaliste, exigeant, sévère, et d'une mère respectueuse, douce et protectrice, c’est entre la glace et le magma que Hugo Hamilton a grandi. C’est grâce à cette fusion qu’à présent il nous offre ce bijou.

Le jugement ? C’est à vous de le faire. Vous trouverez, à travers ce livre, la description impartiale d’une enfance à la fois meurtrie et chérie.

Voici l’histoire revue sous le joug de l’ (in)expérience, d’un enfant à la recherche d’identité.

ARTICLE CRITIQUE – Zoé

« Nous dormons en allemand et nous rêvons en irlandais. [...] Nous sommes les gens au sang impur ».

Un père irlandais, une mère allemande. Un père nationaliste, exigeant, sévère ; une mère douce, respectueuse et protectrice. Ni irlandais, ni allemands, partagés entre deux pays, deux langages, deux histoires : tels sont les enfants dont Sang Impur raconte l’histoire.

Ce roman autobiographique de Hugo Hamilton relate l’histoire de cette famille atypique. D’une plume enfantine et décousue, agrémentée de métaphores délicates décrivant la vie de tous les jours et d’allusions à l’Histoire des deux pays, il livre les joies et les douleurs de l’enfance, de la cuisson des gâteaux aux coups de bâtons. Il livre ce qu’on ne peut pas dire, mais aussi ce qui ne doit pas être tu. Il livre la cruauté, l’absurdité et l’innocence de l’enfance, la peur et l’incompréhension, les moments d’amour et les moments d’insouciance.

Il livre une œuvre chargée de l’histoire de deux pays, de deux familles, ainsi que d’une histoire encore à édifier, celle des enfants, celle de l’avenir.

ARTICLE CRITIQUE – Jehan

Avez-vous déjà lu un livre Germano-Irlandais ?!

Hugo Hamilton nous propose cette nouvelle expérience en nous plongeant dans ses mémoires d’après-guerre ; avec toute l’audace et l’ignorance enrichies d’un enfant, il expose son histoire. L’histoire d’une famille « sans-pays » luttant pour la survie d’un langage, d’une culture, d’une différence. Hugo Hamilton nous ballade de Dublin à Berlin. Il sait nous guider avec douceur, calme et détresse, le tout avec l’aisance d’une simplicité apparente. Cependant, malgré toute l’objectivité qu’émet le narrateur, la violence et la brutalité ressortent avec ferveur et vous réserve une lecture au rythme aussi saccadé qu’exquis.

Issu de parents presque antipodiques, avec un père profondément nationaliste et une mère fermement incivique, c’est entre la glace et le magma que Hugo Hamilton a grandi. C’est grâce à cette fusion qu’à présent il nous offre ce bijou. Le jugement ? C’est à vous de le faire, vous trouverez, à travers ce livre la description impartiale d’une enfance à la fois meurtrie et chérie.

En bref, voici l’histoire revue sous le joug de l’ (in)expérience, d’un enfant à la recherche d’identité.

ARTICLE CRITIQUE – Charlotte

« Quand tu es petit, tu ne connais rien. »:c'est sur cette étonnante déclaration que commence le roman d'Hugo Hamilton. A première vue évidente, cette affirmation émanant d'un narrateur à la fois candide mais étonnamment clairvoyant, prend tout son sens au fil du récit de la vie de ce jeune garçon. Poignant, fascinant, parfois poétique mais toujours émouvant, ce roman retrace plus qu'une histoire, une quête : la quête d'un enfant pour son identité.

Mais pour trouver qui l'on est, et où l'on va, il faut savoir d'où l'on vient,c'est ce principe qu'applique Hugo Hamilton qui, tout au long de ce roman fait part au lecteur des secrets, des non-dits et des souvenirs enfouis des parents du jeune narrateur.

A la fois allemand, anglais et irlandais, il cherche une place dans un monde d'après guerre dur et cruel où le traumatisme du Nazisme est omniprésent et où il ne fait pas bon être à moitié allemand.

Complètement transporté dans l'Irlande des années 1950, on devient complice et proche de cet enfant que l'on ne veut abandonner pour rien au monde : un roman simplement saisissant.

ARTICLE CRITIQUE – Laura

Plongé dans le Dublin pauvre des années d'après guerre, au beau milieu d'une famille dirigée par un père irlandais engagé et une mère allemande vue comme une nazie, l'auteur de The Speckled People et sa fratrie sont tiraillés entre 3 cultures différentes : celles de leurs parents et la culture britannique. Le patriotisme extrême du père et l'interdiction de parler l'anglais auront raison de l'intégration des enfants, alors qu'ils souhaiteraient seulement jouer, parler comme les autres, ils se verront perdus et isolés malgré l'amour abondant de la mère. Sans jamais se plaindre, le narrateur d’Hugo Hamilton relate son histoire à travers ses yeux d'enfants ; un récit simple, naïf et juste d’un petit garçon rêveur, mais aussi turbulent qui ne sait pas trop qui il est. Est-il allemand ? Est-il nazi ? Est-il irlandais ? Tout cela est émouvant et drôle à la fois. La jeunesse et la candeur du narrateur permettent alors de dédramatiser bien des situations tout en les pointant sérieusement du doigt. Une dénonciation masquée des préjugés ancrés dans un monde où il faut appartenir à une catégorie seulement : les bons ou les mauvais ; mais au final, ne sommes-nous pas tous bons, tous mauvais et tous tachetés... ?

ARTICLE CRITIQUE – Tiphaine

"We are forbidden from speaking English. We are trapped in a language war. We are the Speckled People.". Dans l’un des plus originaux mémoires de cette génération, Hugo Hamilton nous plonge dans son obsédante enfance qu’il choisit de nous conter à travers l’œil d’un enfant. Entre un père irlandais extrêmement nationaliste et une mère allemande très aimante, Hamilton nous dévoile les détails de son enfance dans le Dublin pauvre des années 50 et 60, au milieu d’une guerre des langages. De la lutte contre les clichés Nazis qu’ont les Irlandais jusqu’à l’obsession d’un père attaché à son héritage culturel et linguistique qui interdit à sa famille de parler anglais, en passant par la passion d’une mère pour ses enfants, plus que protectrice, elle-même usée par la tyrannie de son mari, cette histoire lutte avec ce que signifie d’être « Speckled » “half and half...Irish on top andGermanbelow.”Ce livre traite progressivement, de manière choquante mais honnête, de la signification de la famille, de la langue et de l'identité. C’est avec géni que l’auteur réussit à nous plonger dans son récit, dévoilant peu à peu les secrets cachés par les parents dans une armoire.

ARTICLE CRITIQUE – Vivien

« Quand on est petit, on ne sait rien ».

Dans ce livre, il est en effet plaisant de voir le choix que fait l’auteur que de prendre le point de vue d’un enfant. Ce côté candide rend une vision du monde particulière qui fat de The Speckled People une œuvre unique. C’est dans ce roman auto-biographique qu’Hugo Hamilton, à travers des yeux de l’enfant qu’il était, fait le récit d’une période difficile de l’Histoire d’Irlande que sont les années 50 et 60.

Tout au long de son récit, des faits historiques irlandais y sont décrits mais de manière simplifiée et qui se greffe parfaitement avec le personnage de l’enfant. C’est donc grâce à ce style d’écriture que le roman tire son charme et devient émouvant, car c’est au final ni plus ni moins que l’histoire d’un enfant et de sa famille coincés entre les attaques liées aux origines allemandes de la mère et le nationalisme pur et dur du père.

La simplicité de l’œuvre la rend attrayante et mémorable.

Premières : The Speckled People

HISTORY (through the story)

The story began during the 50’s in Dublin.

The narrator, who was born in 1953, i.e. just after the Second World war, was a little boy raised in a german-irish family.

At this time in history, the Republic of Ireland wanted to prove its independence by a strong nationalism (cf the narrator’s father in the story).

As a result, being half Irish but mainly half german was very difficult to endure for a seven-year-old boy.

In this book, Hugo Hamilton jungles in a disconcerting and at the same time emotional way with the past in order to expose the story of his childhood.

He wonderfuly handles the art of flashbacks.

Indeed, the way how he tells us the story of his grandparents is simply amazing.

 Félix, Jehan, Mylène & Vivien

THE CHARACTERS

The children: Hugo, Franz and Maria.

The mother: Irmgard; she grew up in Kempen. She was raped by her boss (Stigler) when she was younger. She’s homesick because she’s German, so she’s unhappy, but always lovely, nice.

The father: Jack; he was a school teacher. He’s very nationalist, so strange and violent. We know that he comes from Cork and works as an engineer in Dublin and writes his name in Irish. When he was young, Ireland was still under British ruling, his father’s family were all fishermen.

Grandmother (to the mother): Berta Kaiser : opera singer.

Grandfather (to the mother) : Franz Kaiser.

Grandfather (to the father): John, a nationalist, sailor of the British Navy. He fell on deck one day and lost his memory and died not long after that, in a hospital, in Cork city.

Grandmother (for the father): Mary Frances.

At the time of the story, all grandparents are dead. But there’s no photo of the grandparents on the side of the father.

Uncle Ted: He’s the younger brother of the father. He gave candies to the children each time he met them and he is a priest.

Uncle Gerd: He’s the brother of the mother. He refused to be a nazi.

Aunt Marianne: She’s the sister of the mother, and has a daughter called Christianne.

We can think that the mother was fed up with the father and that she wanted to go back to her country with her children. But the father threatened her, so she obeyed.

We don’t know if the narrator gets along well with his sister and brother because we don’t know what he thinks about them.

 Eve, Laura, Lisa & Tiphaine

Narrative strategy

In this book, which is an indirect autobiography, Hugo Hamilton -via his narrator- tells us about the situation in Northern Ireland just after the Second World War. Indeed, his mother is German and he was raised as if he was responsible of what happened during the war. This story of a multicultural childhood gives us a new vision of the situation in Northern Ireland.

At first, nothing shows that it is an autobiography; it's shaped like a fiction about the situation in Ireland. The narrator gives a complete description of every event, and also lets us feel what he feels at every moment. Therefore, we can understand that this work is the story of his life; however, Hugo Hamilton doesn’t let his adult side be part of the story – or only very subtly –, he only writes this book through the eyes of a child, the child that he was back. He talks about all the problems and the difficulties naively; he doesn’t know how serious the things are. The narrator gives the story as he hears it from his father or his mother, what he hears and sees is what he understands, what he remembers and also what he tells us.

Through this narrative strategy, the reader gets really attached to this innocent child who is living in this heated environment. Indeed, the fact that he and his brothers are half German make them be mocked and bullied by the other children as "Nazis.” Also, because everyone speaks English outside, but their father had totally forbidden the English language inside his home, they have to speak Irish or German. They live in a constant conflict between two worlds; the one their parents create at home, which is a multicultural where they try to make their two cultures coexist: the children wear Lederhosen and Aran sweaters; and the one outside, where everyone speaks English and where they are seen as “different” and where they are not accepted. They are also at the heart of a conflict between their two parents over intolerance and violence, and the vision they have of their “home”, they disagree on how to live. These difficulties make this narrator be even more touching, because everything he’s living doesn’t seem to shock him, or to ruin his happiness full of simple things. As he starts to refuse his father's language lessons, using whatever weapons a child can use - illness, anger, silence, naughtiness - he loses that firm patriarchal sense of direction, but finds that there might be advantages at being lost...

Klara

The narrator/ narrative strategy

In this book, what is striking is probably the narrative strategy. Indeed, the book is not written in a normal way. The author chose to write his book with a child's eye vision. The story is told with the experience, the language, the point of view of a little boy. As he said, « he was a child who knew nothing  already». The facts are related, with the tact, the innocence, the truthfulness, and the judgement of a child. It may be the whole originality of the book. Futhermore, the facts are related in such a way that we can't really know if the novel is truly an autobiography, or if some facts are a bit exaggerated, or simply made-up. Thus, we are on both sides, in order to know if the novel is a kind of autobiography, fiction, or also a mix of both.

In the end, we can infer that the narrator's choice of adopting a child eye's vision allows the reader to make his own judgement, his own interpretation of the story, on how he understands it. The mix between an autobiography and a fiction makes the story particulary original.

Nathalie

The narrator and narrative strategy:

First, we have to say that this novel is an autobiography written by Hugo Hamilton. Even though, it is Hamilton, an adult, who wrote this book, we read this book and discover Ireland throughout a child’s eyes. It may be original to use that process. Indeed, thanks to his strategy of narration, the character seems to be a candid, and an innocent child. When you read this book, you, more or less, go back to your childhood. Thus, you may change your world’s vision and adopt his strategy. Hamilton used, of course, the first person.

Second, in his book Hamilton uses an internal point of view. Indeed he takes a child’s vision, his eyes. The narrator gives us the impression that he knows nothing about his destiny , in spite of the fact that he has already lived it. This is a kind of return in the past, and even if doesn't remember everything, he succeeds in imagining a realistic dialogue which matches his story and so his life. So we can say that this book is also a kind of fiction on the one hand and a realistic one on the other hand. As we can read in the Speckled People, there is a mix of direct and indirect speech. We can suppose that he used indirect speech when he perhaps forgot important details that would give meaning to his questioning.

Then, Hamilton uses another strategy. Indeed, it is hard to know if he uses the process of convincing or that of persuading. Throughout the book, you may see that Hugo Hamilton is playing on feelings, impressions and it may catch you inside the story.

On the one hand, the narrator tries to convince us with rational and reasonable arguments. In his book, Hamilton speaks a lot about the History of Germany. Indeed, he often makes a reference to the Second World War, Nazism and the difficulties that his mother faced/encountered. The mother has a past which may be hard to understand for Irish people. It may not have been simple to include her in their world. As a consequence, we could say that Hugo’s mother is the symbol of the problems that German people have to live with after the war. Of course, they were not all guilty, but to many (and some Irish people included), only their nationality mattered. So, we may say that Hugo Hamilton tries to convince us, alluding to History, which is represented by his mother.

On the other hand, we could feel that Hamilton also tries to persuade us. Indeed, he is himself, the stereotype of the bullying, the teasing, and the nastiness that people between two cultures may be confronted to. Moreover, he is a German person and the story happened some years after the end of WW2. You will see that people are still aware of that thing and that swastikas appeared on the narrator’s road. Thus, every day, he suffered from those things and he may want to touch/affect us with those feelings since they were the problems he was faced with: calling on the reader’s pity for him and for the whole family.

To conclude, we can say that Hamilton uses two strategies of argumentation: convincing and persuading.

As a consequence, after having studied Hugo Hamilton’s narrative strategy, we can say that it is a little complex but that is also part of what makes the reader feel part of the novel.

Quentin, Vahé & Valentin

Meaning of home

In his book Hugo Hamilton shares his childhood, between Germany and Ireland. He is looking for his own identity, that's why the meaning of home is very important there.

In Hugo Hamilton’s work there is a sort of obsession with identity and with what constitutes it : language, memory, the past, heritage and nationhood are interlinked with home and displacement. His writing is characterised by a continuous and pervasive exploration of both personal and shared identity. In line with the Irish tradition, personal identity is continuously related and tightly connected to national identity. Personal identity is always at stake, and Hanno, the young protagonist of The Speckled People, relates himself repeatedly to his father: “You always have to walk like yourself, not like your father or the crabs, just like yourself.”

In the 20^th chapter, the family travels to Connemara and arrives during the evening. There, the family finally fits in a community: the mother gives German lessons while the father speaks Irish all the time, without hearing any word in English. The child really enjoys Connemara. Indeed, he describes it as “ the place where we all wanted to be for the rest of our lives”. In Connemara, they met unusual people who didn't speak English at all, and who could “remember as far back as infinity”. The kid and his family are also surprised by the beauty of everything they see : they discover wonderful landscapes, which are simple. They describe them as the most beautiful things they've ever seen. They describe the area by telling that it is “rich with nothing”. One day, the father tells during a speech in Connemara, that the Irish language is still alive and that it is an important thing. Even after a small incident, nobody makes fun of the father.

In fact, meanings of home and idendity are different according to the young protagonist and his family : they show us that it depends on the place where you live, the people who surround you...

Hugo's mother compensates her homesickness for Germany by dressing her sons in lederhosen, maintaining German Christmas traditions, basically creating a German domestic life for her family within the confines of their home. Meanwhile, after spending many years in Ireland, she doesn't recognize anything when she goes back there : “ she was lost, she couldn't recognize anything.”

The protagonist is continuously moving from Germany to Ireland , continuously displaced. When they were in Germany, all the family felt better : "Nobody would ever call us Nazis. My father would have lots more friends and my mother would have all her sisters to talk to."

In his work Hugo Hamilton tries to make us understand that it is difficult to find our own identity when we are torn between two different cultures. “We’re trying to go home now. We’re still trying to find our way home, but sometimes it’s hard to know where that is any more.”

Julie J, Marie, Mégane, Samantha & Sophie

Theme : Laguage and Secrets

The Speckled People is a book published in 2003. The author, Hugo Hamilton, was born in Dublin in 1953, he has published five novels and a collection of short stories. He tells us in his original book his own story, his childhood in Dublin torn apart between a sweet German mother and a hard Irish nationalist father. But, further from the tale of his life when he was a little boy, this book also reveals the story of his battle for identity strongly linked to languages. Hugo Hamilton says in his book : "We sleep in German and dream in Irish” : he built himself around English which is the official language of Ireland, German spoken by his mother and Irish made compulsory by his father. Moreover, Hugo Hamilton's childhood is filled with secrets and we learn all along the book clues to elucidate his mother and father's secrets. We can focus on those themes : secrets and languages in The Speckled people which are central to understand the whole book and to understand what the childhood of the author was.

Firstly, we can study the language that the author uses to tell his story. Hugo Hamilton uses different writing proses. With a child's words, he transports us to a violent universe through the eyes of a little boy. The syntax is very simple as we can notice, all along the book. For example the first sentences are “When you’re small you know nothing. When I was small I woke up in Germany. [...] Then I got up and looked out the window and saw Ireland.” : these are simple, short sentences, without ponctuation, as a child might say. Indeed, the entire story is narrated from the point of view of a naïve but observing child, with a specific and simple vocabulary.

He writes over the pen, but he keeps a chronological sense, such as when he tells the history of his mother. First in chapter 8 he talks about how her family flew the crises to go to Brazil, then how she had to go back to Europe and live with her Onkel Gerd, and the problems he had with the Nazi party. In chapters 15, 17 or 22, he writes about wen his mother began to work, what the Nazis did and what happened to her in Venlo. He observes and registers many of these incidents as a child, without knowing their significance. The reader, with a little knowledge of the period, is able to draw the right conclusions, although as the author matures, he begins to understand all the events he has narrated.

Secondly, we will focus on the role of the language within the plot and the author’s chlildhood. When he was a child, Hamilton was obligated to speak Irish with his father and German with his mother. However, he lived in Ireland where the official language was English. Thus, he had to speak English with his classmates or the grocer, for example. It was really difficult for a young child and sometimes he met difficulties about it. Besides, he created some specific “passwords” with his brother, some English expressions that he used only with him.

In addition, he was persecuted because he spoke German with his brother. As a matter of fact, the scene took place after the Second World War, and Nazism was still anchored in people’s minds. So, he was sometimes given nicknames such as “Hitler” or “a nazi”. Nevertheless, as he was young and innocent, he didn't really suffer from it. His mother told him to surrender, he wasn't culprit.

Furthermore, his mother doesn't really talk all along the book, we don’t know exactly what she feels. For example, in chapter 1, she is crying and laughing at the same time during a family walk. But, even if she is very silent, she always wants to relate her past which the narrator calls the “film”. In fact, she is a caring mother, using hugs and making cakes to give her children love.

We can notice that the book is written in English. It may be a way to go back to this problem or to “defy” his father because he hated this language, as he was an Irish nationalist.

Indeed, amongst the several languages mentioned in the book, one is particularly important to the narrator’s father’s eyes: Irish. Loving his country, Ireland, the most beautiful of all, he is obviously a nationalist. But Ireland isn’t free, his loved country is losing little by little his culture because it has been a British colony for a long time. Therefore, the enemy is already designed : England.

Hugo Hamilton draws for us the image of a fanatic Irish nationalist who refuses every form of British culture : he is leading a real struggle with his orator’s qualities when he holds speeches. One day, he decides to encourage Irish people, who are used to speaking English, to speak Gaelic which is the traditional Irish language. He thinks that all the names of the streets have been changed to English names, so he decides to write the Gaelic names of the streets on the signs.

This fanaticism can also be seen in the relations he has with his own family. He doesn’t allow his children to speak the language of the enemy. They are only allowed to communicate in Irish, or in German with their mother. He uses his children as a weapon to restore the Irish language, as it is said in chapter 15. And either they speak Irish, or get knackered if they speak English.

All this exacerbated nationalism fits the narrator’s goal of reporting the awkward situation he lived with the different languages he knew when he was young. This situation influenced his way to write The Speckled People as well as the way he grew up.

The notion of secrets is also very important in this work. The parents of the narrator both have secrets that are more or less hidden.

To begin, the father has several secrets. His personality is complicated to reach and to grasp. At the beginning we just consider him as a hard father strongly nationalist. But thanks to his secrets we understand better who this main character is.

We learn about his secrets right from chapter 2, with the plot of the wardrobe which is recurrent. Indeed, the past of Jack (the narrator's father) is hidden in that wardrobe. The narrator, one day disobeyed his father, and with his brother and sister opened and entered it to find the picture of a British sailor, who was Jack's father. We learn later, in chapter 12, that the narrator's grandfather had fought with the British during the First World War, before the independence of Ireland. But after he fell down on a boat, he became insane and didn't remember who he was. But the British marines didn't accept to pay the regular rent to Jack's mother, who as a result became poor and had to leave her house with her two sons : Jack and “Ted”. It's one of the several reasons which lead Jack to force his children to speak only Irish and not English, that he hates.

But it's not the only secret of the narrator's father. We learn that Jack has been a redactor in a nationalist newspaper: the Aiséiri. But we find out thanks to Gearoid (a friend of Jack’s), in chapter 26, that he wrote just before the Second World War an anti-Jewish article. And the reader discovers that secret at the same time as the mother does. That’s why she is very angry toward her husband : “ After that my mother was very upset and she didn't even do the washing-up.” There were secrets between both parents.

The reader also finds out that Jack, who always said to his children that he was lame because he had the polio when he was young, actually lied. It was just a birth deformity.

So, the father's past represents a huge secret which is amongst the governing principles of that book.

Another of the most striking secrets in The Speckled People is the mother’s secret. It is suggested that she was raped by her employer when she was nineteen. To tell this part of her life to her children, the mother uses a metaphor and says she has lived a “bad film” when she was in Germany. We learn the entire story as we go along the book : at the beginning, she only tells a part of it : “She was in a building where there was nobody else living. [...] She heard the man coming and there was nothing she could do exept pray and hope that it would be all over some day.” (chapter 3). Thus, we can’t really know what happend to her, even if we can make hypotheses : we are placed in the situation of the children, who are too young to understand. It is only by reading the next chapters that the story is told in its whole. And even though lots of details are given, the rape is not totally explicit : for instance the word “rape” is never mentionned. This obviously must be due to the childlike point of view the narrator sets ; at this point the reader is like the children who know from now on what happend to their mother, perhaps without fully understanding it. But this device also insists on the notions of secret and inuendos.

We learn that the mother was forced to keep the rape she had lived a secret. Indeed, her employer and agressor Herr Stiegler made her understand that she should not tell anything to the authorities, for he had connexions in the Gestapo, therefore they would never believe her : “It wasn’t a good idea for her to contact them because he had too many friends in the Gestapo. They would never believe her.” (chapter 19). Besides, Frau Stiegler, her employer’s wife, refused to believe her and threatened her to tell the police too if anybody learnt about this story : “If you say a single word to me or to anyone about this, [...] I will call the police insantly.” ( chapter 22)

We can say that this story is a secret, but at the same time it is not : the mother can’t talk about it but she doesn’t want it to remain unknown forever. So she writes down those “things that you can’t say in a song, or a story, only on the typewriter for people to read later” (chapter 17). She wants her children to know about it, but as they’re too young to be told such a story, she wants them to read it when they grow up. Therefore, one can infer that the narrator tells a story that he has not heard yet as a child, since his mother has not told it to him, and he has not read her writing yet. Consequently, it may be the narrator as an adult who tells his mother’s secret, but through the child’s eyes he uses throughout the book, almost as a catharsis for the adult he has become.

The mother’s secret is like something that’s haunting her all the time : “It was only something that she could not put out of her head. [...] Sometimes it was there on the back of her mind.” (chapter 17) and that she needs to tell, so that this memory would finally go away : “She had almost put [it] away by writing it down in a diary.” (chapter 19). Any single thing that has, one way or another, a link with her secret, makes her think about it, such as smoke ; any time she finds herself alone, she thinks about it. That is why it has a big influence on her life, her family’s life and their way to act.

All in all, those secrets are very important elements in the book, because they have an influence on the children, the way they see ther parents, the way they grow up.

As a conclusion, we can say that languages and secrets in The Speckled Pople are linked to one another : the secrets create tensios around the languages, and those tensions create even more secrets. Moreover, they both have a huge importance within the history of the family : they come to mean a lot of changes in the childhood of the characters and their family life, but also the way the entire book was written.

 Emma, Julie L, Julien & Zoé

The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton

Hugo Hamilton grew up in Dublin in the 1950's, son of a softly spoken, good natured German mother and an obsessive Irish Nationalist father. His father was obsessed with reviving the Irish language and he went around Ireland during war time making speeches for Irish neutrality and married Irmgard after the war as part of his plan for "bringing people from other countries over to Ireland". He seemed more concerned with the Ireland of the future than with his own children's future, ruling with an iron hand, severally punishing his children whenever he caught them speaking english. He is an intimidating, sometimes brutal figure, who refused to acknowledge his name in english, and at one stage while he worked for the ESB, he left a large area without electricity for days because the correspondence was not addressed to him in his beloved Irish name. The issue of mixed culture is dealt with very well by Hamilton and anyone who is of a dual nationality will relate very well with the young boy's feelings.

The parents disagreed on how to live. The mother believed in laughter and inner strength as a means of survival, a tactic which her own father used to survive under Nazism. It is interesting to observe how the parents do not discuss politics eventhough both their lives have been very affected by it.

Although the book is written very simply, full of a child's insights and bewilderments, it is done in a very effective way of conveying the deep emotions and isolation associated with emigration and a boys struggle from a very early age with the idea of identity and conflicting notions of Irish history and German history.

This book was much appreciated by our book club members, for its sensitive observation of a family trying to deal with real issues of identity and belonging and the way it is told in the language of a child who has not yet learned to query all he observes engages the reader all the more.

Reviewed by Kilrush Library Book Club

A tale of two tongues

A tale of two tongues

Hermione Lee is captivated by Hugo Hamilton's memoir, The Speckled People, which avoids the trap of the 'cliché-ridden Irish-Catholic childhood' and beautifully evokes a search for self and nationality

The Guardian, Saturday 25 January 2003






The Speckled Peopleby Hugo Hamilton

304pp, Fourth Estate.


Anyone setting out to write about their Irish childhood should have in mind Roy Foster's gleefully ferocious attack on the Frank McCourt school of bestselling, cliché-ridden "miserable Irish-Catholic childhoods" written with "an utter lack of distinguished style". They will also be conscious of the glittering weight of more distinguished predecessors in Irish autobiography, from Yeats and Shaw to Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor and Patrick Kavanagh.


Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People triumphantly avoids the Angela's Ashes style of sentimental nostalgia and victim claims, and stands up well in the mighty, unending competition for most memorable Irish life-story. It does not subtitle itself a memoir (though the blurb calls it one), and it's not a straightforward reminiscence. More like the early pages of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, it's shaped like a fiction, told, as if naively, in the language of a child.


It incorporates in passing, but often without much annotation, a complex web of allusions to literature, politics and history. One example: the father admires Cardinal Stepinac, who he thinks "should be made into a saint". This refers to the exposure by Protestant nationalist writer Hubert Butler - very unwelcome to the Irish Catholic Church - of the wartime campaign in Croatia to forcibly convert half a million Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism. But Hamilton gives the story as he hears it from his father; it's up to us to provide the historical background.


Gradually, what the child-narrator sees and hears begins to turn into what he knows and understands - secrets, conflicts, histories, beliefs. It is a bold strategy, because it does so call Joyce to mind, but it pays off handsomely. This story about a battle over language and a defeat in "the language wars" is also a victory for eloquent writing, crafty and cunning in its apparent simplicity.


Hamilton grew up in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s with his brother and sisters. His mother, Irmgard Kaiser, came from Kempen, a small town in Germany. Her father fought in the first world war, owned a stationery shop and died when she was nine. Her mother was an opera singer; there were five sisters. She and her family lived through terrible times under the Nazis and in the war she was abused and raped by her employer.


She left Germany to go on a pilgrimage in Ireland and stayed on. The man she married, Jack Hamilton - or Sean Ó hUrmoltaigh, as he renamed himself - belonged to a west Cork family, from Leap and Skibbereen, that beautiful country marked with a history of nationalism, poverty, famine, religion and emigration. His grandfather was an Irish-speaking Munster poet; but his father - wiped from the record by his son - served and died in the British Navy.


An engineer in Dublin, Jack Hamilton dedicated his life to the anti-British, nationalist cause, and above all to the rehabilitation of the Irish language. He went around the country in wartime, making speeches for Irish neutrality and the Irish tongue; after the war he married Irmgard as part of his plan for "bringing people from other countries over to Ireland". He belonged to a group called Aiseirí (Irish for "resurrection"), whose publications were anti-semitic as well as anti-British. He campaigned for changing Dublin's street-names into Irish, and he sent his children to Irish-language schools. They were to be his "weapons" in the language wars. If they spoke English at home, he beat them.


"He says 'Irish people drink too much and talk too much and don't want to speak Irish, because it stinks of poverty and dead people left lying in the fields... The Irish language reminds them of the big famine when they had nothing to eat except the old poems in Irish... One day the Irish people will wake up and wonder if they're still Irish,' he says. And that's why it's important not to bring bad words like fruitgum into the house."


No English-speaking school-friends are allowed in; the great wave of Anglo-American music pulsing through the world in the 1960s stops at their front door. When the children come home wearing poppies on Armistice Day, they are ripped from their coats and hurled into the fire: only shamrock badges are allowed, on St Patrick's Day. This angry, determined, fanatical character is, in the end, stung to death by his own bees: a story so metaphorically apt, and told with such power, that it reads more like a Greek myth than a piece of history.


The children wear Lederhosen and Aran sweaters. They speak German and Irish at home, but their mother doesn't speak Irish. Outside, where the Dubliners all speak English, they are mocked and bullied by the other children as "Nazis". On their visits to the German sisters (warmly invoked), they compare Ireland and Germany. When they go to the Gaeltacht in Connemara, where everyone speaks Irish, they talk about the state of the Irish language - and the English prose of the book moves into lyrical rhythms, a kind of Synge-song: "All of us dreaming and sheltering from the words, speaking no language at all, just listening to the voice of the rain falling and... the water [whispering] along the roadside like the only language allowed."


Inside the Dublin house, there is a war going on between the father and the mother over intolerance and violence, and between the father and his children over language and beliefs. Both parents draw parallels between the British colonisation of Ireland and the Nazis' treatment of the Jews. Both insist on the relation between "language" and "home", and it's that link that makes the deepest story of the book. "My father says your language is your home and your country is your language and your language is your flag." Their mother tells them of all the exiles in the world: "Homesick people carry anger with them in their suitcases. And that's the most dangerous thing in the world, suitcases full of helpless, homesick anger."


But the parents disagree on how to live. Their father is a tyrant and a proselytising ideologue and an absolutist; their mother believes - as her father did under Nazism - in laughter and inner strength and adaptability as means of survival: "My mother just closes the doors... telling everybody that it's no good to win and it's better to pretend that there's no such thing as pain and nobody can make you smile and you should keep saying the silent negative all the time."


Hugo Hamilton is a well-established novelist and has been making use of this material since he started to write. The Speckled People reworks several earlier, fictional versions of it: his novel The Last Shot told the story of his mother's childhood in Kempen; his short story "Nazi Christmas" (in the collection Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow) is the basis for a scene in the memoir in which the local children launch a xenophobic attack. Garda Pat Coyne's crusading father, in the Dublin comedy Headbanger, is very like Jack Hamilton. Coyne is haunted, as Hugo Hamilton is in The Speckled People, by the memory of a moment in his childhood when he saw his father on the street and viewed him as a stranger.


It's that painful distancing, that making strange of a family life which was once so overwhelmingly close, which gives The Speckled People its force. The child's confusion over his own nationality, his sense of doubleness and specialness, and his growing resistance to his father's brutality and monomania, make for a more than usually extreme Oedipal conflict.


As he starts to refuse his father's language lessons, using whatever weapons a child can use - illness, anger, silence, naughtiness - he loses that firm patriarchal sense of direction, but finds that there might be advantages to being lost. He works out his own understanding of a mixed, "speckled", multiple, modern society: "Ireland has more than one story." That process of making up his mind about his self, his nation and his language is tentative, repetitive and slow, but this fine and singular book suggests how to get there in the end.



· Hermione Lee's books include a biography of Virginia Woolf

The Sailor in the Wardrobe by Hugo Hamilton

Terry Eagleton



The Guardian, Saturday 4 February 2006

The Sailor in the Wardrobe 

by Hugo Hamilton

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history. Gothic's fascination with ruins and ancient crimes, spying priests and bloodstained histories, is tailor-made for the place. The past in Ireland refuses a decent burial; instead, it preys on the living in the monstrous form of the undead. The author of the greatest book of the undead, Dracula, was a Dublin civil servant. For all their hard-headedness, the Protestant ascendency which governed Ireland for two centuries were a remarkably spooky bunch, as WB Yeats's dabbling in ghouls and demons bears witness. James Joyce's hero Stephen Dedalus declares that he is trying to awake from the nightmare of history; but the worst nightmare of all is to think you have woken up only to find that you haven't. We have seen several examples of such false awakening in Northern Ireland over the past few decades.

Hugo Hamilton's first memoir, The Speckled People, was all about festering secrets and guilt-ridden histories. The child Hugo imagines the dead whispering ceaselessly in their graves, holding sway over the living. His father is a heavy-handed Irish chauvinist who forbids his children to speak English in the house. Full of Micawberish schemes and crackpot commercial projects, he insists on doing business only with clients who call him by the Irish version of his surname, which unfortunately for his bank balance is O hUrmoltaigh. Hamilton's mother is German, a refugee from the collapse of the Third Reich, and teaches her language and history to her children.

Just as Ireland itself passed from Irish to English in the 19th century, so the fork-tongued Hugo is adrift between languages, bereft of a home or history to call his own. He is both far too Irish and far too little so for the comfort of postwar Dublin. As a child, he becomes a repository of bitter historical memories without even knowing it, a receptacle for the stored-up animosity of centuries. As a German he is an aggressor, and as Irish he is a victim. Children in the street call him Nazi and Jew-burner, while his father seeks to brand him with a more Gaelic kind of anti-Britishness. The book is all about the violence of voices, being trapped inside names and tongues or being exiled from them. Like a lot of Irish literature, its secret protagonist is language itself. In a boldly symbolic moment, the family even chew at dinner on the leathery tongue of an ox.

What The Speckled People uses to counter this verbal violence is its own literary style. It is written in the wide-eyed idiom of a child, one of the few kinds of language in the book which is not out to maim or manipulate. The Sailor in the Wardrobe, Hamilton's latest memoir, is couched in a more streetwise style, though still with an aura of innocence about it. We have moved on from the 1950s to the 60s, and from the author's childhood to his adolescence. Otherwise, not much seems to have changed. Progress can be measured by the fact that the local kids now call him Eichmann rather than Hitler. Hamilton senior is still dreaming of an Irish-speaking Ireland. His wife is still plagued by the horrors she endured in Hitler's Germany. There is an air of déjà vu about the book, as though the best-selling formula of the first memoir is being rolled out again. Even the cover is similar.

Yet this new memoir is more than just a Return of the Speckled People. It is an enchanting piece of work in its own right, and the fact that not much has changed is part of the point. Young Hugo has discovered a temporary escape from the problems of culture in nature, working with boats in a Dublin harbour. He dreams of shedding his identity, giving history the slip, becoming a kind of Beckettian "nobody". He had, as he says, no story for himself, since narratives are acts of violence. In a desperate moment of self-annihilation, he tries to "unremember" Germany, his family and his childhood. In one magnificent scene, he tells his father that it is ignorance he desires, not knowledge, and the outraged patriarch throws a bowl of stewed apples at his head. As in Eden, knowledge is dangerous, divisive stuff, and Hugo prefers to have apples tipped over his head than to bite on them.

But the present keeps evoking traumatic images of the past, and even among the fishing boats a sectarian history intervenes. You can smell the resentment on the pier between Dan, the Catholic from Derry, and Tyrone, the Protestant from Belfast. The Speckled People set a family's private troubles against the political background of the Irish struggle for independence and the second world war. Here, a decade or so on, the Northern Irish troubles, Vietnam and Martin Luther King are beautifully interwoven with Hugo's part-poignant, part-farcical rebellion against his own local tyrants. He longs to kill his father, but knows that the self-hatred this will sow in him will perpetuate a history of brutality rather than abolish it. Rather like Ireland itself, the book is full of an explosive hatred laced with a deep hunger for peace. Besides, the boy's rebelliousness imitates that of his mother, who was a silent protester against the Nazis. His refusal to serve thus binds him to the deathly lineage he seeks to overcome. Nothing is more typical of modern Irish history than wanting to break free of it.

The family in Ireland has often been a microcosm of history, rather than (as usually in England) a shelter from it. For centuries, the typical Irish family was the farm, which linked the domestic, the economic and (given rural militancy) the political. True to this inheritance, Hamilton has an intuitive flair for spotting connections between personal and public worlds. The boys at his school, enraged by a bullying teacher and inspired by the street-fighting in Belfast, rise up in mass rebellion.

When it comes to its turbulent history, today's Ireland is caught between nostalgia and amnesia, a surfeit of belief and a shortage of it. There are old-style nationalists like Hamilton père, who dream of the future rebirth of a past nation that never existed. And there are cool, postmodern sceptics who throw up in disgust at the very mention of the great famine or Easter 1916. Each camp is the inverted mirror-image of the other. Repressing your history is as much a way of not handling it as wallowing morbidly in it. It is deeply to Hamilton's credit that his writing refuses both of these false solutions. If his father is portrayed as a terrifying figure, he is also a tragic one. For all his chauvinist fantasies, he condemns the IRA, comes to confess some of his past mistakes, and is a moderniser in his own eccentric style. He even ends up committing the unforgivable sin of speaking English in a soft Cork accent.

As for Hamilton fils, he must resolve his Oedipal ambivalence to his father, whom he detests with a tender love, just as he must resolve the conundrum that history can be neither accepted nor ignored. Instead, it can be conquered only by being confronted. Memory can be an act of redemption as well as a force for oppression; by remembering the dead, the boy reflects, you can help to keep them alive. Fascism, by contrast, seeks to annihilate those it slaughters twice over, erasing them from the historical record. The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it. In confessing his own mistakes, Hugo's father sets him free to make his own. Just as his mother worked for the German de-Nazification courts, which sought to stare historical horrors in the face, so at the end of the book the son makes his pilgrimage to Berlin, home of some of his nightmares. He settles there for a while, still speckled or hybrid, still a displaced person, yet wise enough not to exchange the myth of a motherland for the myth of the unattached self. He is now free to become whatever he wishes; yet in coming to Berlin, he is also assuming his German grandfather's identity, giving him back his name and life. In recounting how he grew up with no story to tell, Hamilton has found his story.

· Terry Eagleton's book Holy Terror is published by Oxford University Press.