Awards

• Short-listed for YoungMinds Book Award 2003
• Shortlisted for YoungMinds Book Award 2003.

Overview

‘This is the most gripping book I've read in ages … It is beautifully written, fascinating, disturbing and often very funny.’ Roddy Doyle The childhood world of Hugo Hamilton, born and brought up in Dublin, is a confused place. His father, a sometimes brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic, while his mother, a softly spoken German emigrant who has been marked by the Nazi past, speaks to them in German. He himself wants to speak English. English is, after all, what the other children in Dublin speak. English is what they use when they hunt him down in the streets and dub him Eichmann, as they bring him to trial and sentence him to death at a mock seaside court. Out of this fear and guilt and often comical cultural entanglements, he tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and turn the twisted logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation, but not before he uncovers the long-buried secrets that lie at the bottom of his parents wardrobe. In one of the finest books to have emerged from Ireland in many years, the acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton has finally written his own story – a deeply moving memoir about a whole family's homesickness for a country they can call their own.

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9780007148110

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Reviews

'A wonderful book ! thoughtful and compelling, smart and original, beautifully written ! Hamilton has done an awful lot more with his strange and oddly beautiful childhood than just write it down.' Nick Hornby, Sunday Times 'This story about a battle over language and defeat 'in the language wars' is also a victory for eloquent writing, crafty and cunning in its apparent simplicity.' Hermione Lee, Guardian 'Early as it is to risk a judgment, it is hard to believe that this year will produce many books as memorable or moving as this.' Roy Foster, The Times 'An extraordinary achievement ! a wonderful, subtle, problematic and humane book. It is about Ireland as well as about a particular family, but it is also about alternatives and complexities anywhere. It is about the speckled nature of the world, which, for all its violence, remains fresh to its perceivers.' George Szirtes, Irish Times 'The Speckled People is poetic in its language and construction, lyrical in so many of its descriptions. There is a story full of several different kinds of passion with a real tragedy at its heart. The pain is all there, but so is its antidote.' Margaret Forster 'Donner und Blitzen! What the Jaysus! A memoir of warmth and wisdom. And at last a good -- if flawed -- Irish father. A beautiful German mother. And not too much rain. It is tender and profound and, best of all, tells the truth. I loved it.' Patrick McCabe 'A fine and timely book from an exquisitely gifted writer, this is beautiful, subtle, unflashy, perfectly realised and quite extraordinarily powerful.' Joseph O'Connor

Novelist Hamilton (Sad Bastard, 2002, etc.) recalls childhood in Dublin with a German mother and an Irish father so intensely chauvinistic he would not allow English to be spoken in his home. As one of the speckled people (not purely Irish), the author suffered especially for his German blood in post-WWII Dublin. Other youngsters labeled his brother Hitler, called Hugo Eichmann, and a couple of times held mock trials, once condemning Eichmann to death for war crimes. They had actually begun to carry out the sentence when Hamilton managed a sort of perverse Tom Sawyer escape. Fundamentally concerned with language, the memoir begins with a stark, spare sentence of the sort that Hamilton favors ( When you're small you know nothing ) and ends years later in Germany in the gloom of evening as he and his widowed mother have lost their way. Hamilton shuffles several stories in this ample deck: his own rough coming-of-age; his father's feckless attempts to make a fortune (Dad failed as an importer of wooden crosses from Oberammergau, as a builder of children's wooden toys, and as a beekeeper, stung to death by the ungrateful little buggers); and, most alarming of all, his mother's account of brutal serial rapes she suffered at age 19 from her employer, a randy businessman cozy with the Nazis. Unsurprisingly, Hamilton's mother says her family was not cozy with the Nazis; her intrepid sister once declared in public that it was a shame an assassination attempt on Hitler had failed. Hamilton employs a weird recurring image of a dog that goes to the seashore every day and barks itself hoarse at the waves. Many years later-many dog-years later-an adolescent Hamilton, having decided being a Nazi isn't such a bad thing, nearly drowns the animal for spite. Hamilton writes well and knows the secrets of narrative propulsion, but his story does not always engage or convince. (Kirkus Reviews)

'We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins.' The raisins pepper his skin with specks and make him different from the other children on the Dublin streets. The gang call him and his brother Eichmann and Hitler and the little boys know that the jeers will turn into torture and certain execution if their tormentors catch them alone. Acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton has captured the voice of childhood to relate his experience of growing up: a baffled half-understanding, a reluctant obedience to his father's harsh rules and, finally, rebellion. His father was Irish and insisted that the children speak Irish, punishing them violently if they brought English words into the house. Their loving mother was German and, along with her language and her courageous history, gave them a more gentle morality. Over and over again she would tell them not to fight back for they were 'the word people and not the fist people' and the best defence was 'the silent negative'. Scarcely any other children spoke Irish and their mother's German accent made her hard to understand so the brothers and sisters became more and more isolated. A child hears what an adult says but only gradually begins to make sense of it. This spiral development is present in the structure of the book so that stories are glimpsed and later returned to, and details are repeated and added as the child becomes mature enough to comprehend. Hamilton is never sentimental, never self-pitying; indeed he is harder on himself, or rather the child that he was, than on his parents, but he describes a life where language was a weapon rather than a means of communication. This is an extraordinary book, beautifully written and desperately poignant. (Kirkus UK)

* 'The Speckled People is poetic in its language and construction, lyrical in so many of its descriptions. There is a story full of several different kinds of passion with a real tragedy at its heart. The pain is all there, but so is its antidote.' Margaret Forster * 'Donner und Blitzen! What the Jaysus! A memoir of warmth and wisdom. And at last a good - if flawed - Irish father. A beautiful German mother. And not too much rain. It is tender and profound and, best of all, tells the truth. I loved it.' Patrick McCabe * 'A fine and timely book from an exquisitely gifted writer, this is beautiful, subtle, unflashy, perfectly realised and quite extraordinarily powerful.' Joseph O'Connor

Author Information

Hugo Hamilton is the author of nine novels, two memoirs and a collection of short stories. His work has won a number of international awards, including the 1992 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2003 french Prix Femina Etranger, the 2004 Italian premio Giuseppe Berto and a DAAD scholarship in Berlin. He has also worked as a writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin. Hamilton was born and lives in Dublin.

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