Disguise [Paperback]

Hugo Hamilton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2008

Hugo Hamilton, the internationally acclaimed author of 'The Speckled People' and 'Sailor in the Wardrobe', turns his hand back to fiction with a compelling drama tracing Berlin's central historical importance throughout the twentieth century. 1945. At the end of the second world war in Berlin, a young mother loses her two-year-old boy in the bombings. She flees to the south, where her father finds a young foundling of the same age among the refugee trains to replace the boy. He makes her promise never to tell anyone, including her husband - still fighting on the Russian front - that the boy is not her own. Nobody will know the difference. 2008. Gregor Liedmann is a Jewish man now in his sixties. He's an old rocker who ran away from home, a trumpet player, a revolutionary stone-thrower left over from the 1968 generation. On a single day spent gathering fruit in an orchard outside Berlin with family and friends, Gregor looks back over his life, sifting through fact and memory in order to establish the truth. What happened on that journey south in the final days of the war? Why did his grandfather Emil disappear, and why did the Gestapo torture uncle Max? Here, in the calmness of the orchard, along with his ex-wife Mara and son Daniel, Gregor tries to unlock the secret of his past. In his first novel since the best-selling memoir The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton has created a truly compelling story of lost identity, and a remarkable reflection on the ambiguity of belonging.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As in his memoirs The Speckled People and The Harbor Boys, Hamilton's dominant theme in this absorbing and introspective novel is identity. His protagonist, Gregor Liedmann, was a toddler when Nazi Germany surrendered, and he grew up in Nuremberg enveloped by the nation's shame. By the time he is in his 20s, a musician living in Berlin, Gregor has created a romantic persona for himself, that of a twice-orphaned Jew. The personal history he tells his friends, the woman he marries and his son, is based on denial and instinct, few facts and much supposition. He believes, because he wants to believe, that he was a refugee given to a woman who lost her only child in a bombing. Hamilton writes vividly about the frustration of a boy living with adults damaged by war, though his examination of the common embellishments individuals use while inventing and affirming their own histories can feel redundant. Even so, the questions he raises are fascinating. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In simple prose, this gripping novel sets the elemental adoption story against the weight of a country’s shame and rage across generations.When a young German Catholic mother loses her only child, Gregor, 3, in the bombing of Nuremberg at the end of World War II, her father brings her an orphan from the Holocaust transports and begs her to tell everyone the boy is Gregor, even her husband when he returns from the Russian front. But later someone does tell the child that he is a Jewish survivor. Is it true? Now 60 years later, Gregor Liedmann is a musician living with a community of aging anarchists and punks in Berlin, where his granddaughter is a rebellious environmental activist. His grandfather was haunted by the man he killed in World War I. And Gregor is still driven by the family cover-up: Who is he? The interaction of political history with the personal search for identity, past and present, raises haunting questions about memory, denial, and, always, secrets. --Hazel Rochman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Fourth Estate (GB) (July 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007192169
• ISBN-13: 978-0007192168
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,063,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Our identity is our instability": a German seeks his true past, December 24, 2008

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Disguise: A Novel (Hardcover)

How we shape our identity, and how we inherit our instability, marked Hamilton's fiction long before his memoir of growing up under an Irish-speaking father and a German refugee mother in 1960s Dublin, "The Speckled People," introduced him to many readers. I've admired each of his books; many today may not know much about his first three novels, all about Germany. (I reviewed this trio along with his stories in "Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow" on Amazon.)

"Disguise" continues the searches of earlier families where after the war someone seeks his parent or her child. A son learns how his mother accompanied a Nazi officer who may have fired "The Last Shot"; another German mother faces Stasi-era duplicity in her quest to reunite through "The Love Test"; an Irishman delves into the GDR upbringing of his hosts before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in that "Surrogate City."

These novels all satisfy; "Disguise" enriches Hamilton's treatment here subtly, and elegantly. I'd estimate, having read his previous eight books, that he's aiming here for targets closer to the haunted legacies of countrymen John Banville or Sebastian Barry. There's a control of phrase and pacing here that recalls also European models. "Every now and again, an apple falls to the ground with a bony kind of thud, such as the sound of a hoof on the earth. The discovery of gravity each time." (47) Or, as uncertainty advances: "His entire existence was in Mara's hands, in her imagination, in what she agreed to believe and what she would dismiss. She held him like a porcelain figure, at her mercy, waiting to be dropped to the floor in tiny pieces." (148) Hamilton selects his words patiently, mulling over simple phrases. His own tri-lingual upbringing (English, Irish, and German) may account for his style, which attains a filtered quality distinguishing it from his contemporaries.

He takes on the fringes of a topic that's often overwhelmed the talents of imaginative as well as historical talents: the Holocaust. Hamilton, typically, engages the difficult question asked by Gregor Liedmann (note symbolic echoes), with grace and poise. Was Gregor a Jewish orphan who replaced Marie Liedmann's boy, who died in a bombing near the end of the war? She refuses to admit this to herself or her husband, after he returns from Soviet imprisonment.

The plot alternates between Gregor's 2008 day picking apples (with his estranged wife, Mara, their son, Daniel, and some old hippie friends) and Gregor's exploration of his roots while growing up in the GDR. An omniscient narrator does not admit much more that we need to know, but a reader may be assured that the information given beyond the indirect first-person perspectives of Marie, Mara, or Gregor must be compared with crucial expository details given in the first chapter that are beyond Marie's immediate knowledge, if I am correct. Hamilton's skilled in producing a novel that scans very quickly, yet flows vividly, mixing poetry with philosophy.

Sentences, too many to cite (I jotted down eighteen representative references easily), reveal Hamilton's in top form. There's nuance and power evoked by wartime havoc and lasting grief. The tragedy that cloaks Germany burdens all. Gregor comes of age as if, in Mara's mind, he's unable to foster a talent for love. Mara learns from Marie a conflicting narrative that claims her son's always been such. Mara too enters an uncertain realm where the loyalty to present-day family contends against unsubstantial, unsubstantiated claims to the contrary, that tug him back to a vague allegiance. Early in her relationship with Gregor, she resolves: "Together they would work and travel and reinvent the void he had come from. They would reimagine his true origins like a lost part of music that had been burned in a fire." (66)

The tension of Gregor's reinvention stretches until the final chapter. I'm withholding plot points so as not to spoil your experience. Not a thriller, but as emotionally cathartic for more honesty and less melodrama in confronting the legacy of modern German loss, rage, and shame, Hamilton integrates his study, his family's own past, and his authorial observations into a thought-provoking analysis of survivor's guilt. As in his début novel, "Surrogate City," Berlin now celebrates enduring rather than dreams of greatness. Today, Hamilton finds comfort in a humane response, as in apple orchards, to earlier slaughter as faced by the elder Liedmann, Emil, in WWI, when the cows grazed among the dead in other fields nearby. Skillfully, as with armed Emil facing a battalion of enemy (Russian?) women, or when in a few phrases the whole absurdity of GDR behind the Wall sums itself up by a schoolboy's innocent questions, Hamilton's able to compress much into little space.

One small admission: Daniel, his partner Juli, as well as Mara's sometime lover and Gregor's old friend Martin, needed filling out. Their friends on the apple-gathering day also flit about like extras in a film, when perhaps Hamilton's application of the telling detail for each of them might have fixed their roles better for our appreciation. The Irish sojourn, again, as with the dentist Mr Eckstein, could have been deepened or eliminated; as it is there's either not enough substance or too much digression. John Joe could have been a contender for a truly memorable figure, but he, too, lingers in the supporting cast. Gregor wanders about a lot, but you fail to feel his desires on the road when doing so compared with Mara or Marie's own struggles.

Hamilton in his memoirs and fiction has roamed around Germany, Ireland, and Europe. He addresses cultural encounters within larger problems but strives, at his best here, to keep contact with immediate, recognizable people. He does not let ideas take over his major characters. This is a intelligent consideration of how we can all be warped by dreaming rather than loving, by yearning instead of accepting. Perhaps, as Mara wonders, to cope with our turmoil we all need a disguise, an invented identity?

5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing and Poignant, September 6, 2010

By 

M. D. Edwards "ReaderWriter" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Disguise: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a convoluted story that is both intriguing and troubling. Intriguing in the concept and the telling and troubling in the effect the events have on the characters. If nothing else it shows the dire consequences of war.
The beginning of the book gives us a realistic, almost surrealistic picture of war and particularly the end of WWII in Berlin. The clash of German, American and Russian troops amid the bombing shows the horror of it all through the experiences of a mother who loses her only child to the bombing while waiting for her German soldier husband to get home from the Russian front. Meanwhile her father, a deserter and fugitive, tries to help her escape the chaos. Along the way they encounter an orphan the same age as her lost baby and the father convinces her to adopt the child as her lost Gregor.
The father is caught between the advancing Americans and the retreating Germans and is killed. But the hoax works. The husband makes it back safely and the three survive the war. Everything goes well until the adult Gregor meets with friends and family many years later and slowly learns the truth which no one wants to believe, especially him. The final resolution of the puzzle is satisfying and poignant.

Michael D. Edwards, Author of the recently released "Royal Ryukian Blues" a memoir of Okinawa.

2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a very good novel, June 12, 2009

By 

algo41 "algo41" (philadelphia, pa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Disguise (Paperback)

Hamilton had a good basis for a novel: an orphan who is adopted at age 3, by parents who deny his previous identity. Some of the writing is good, such as the opening description of a German city under bombing attack. Still, "Disguise" is not a very good novel. The biggest problem is that the characters are not well developed. Because of this, it really doesn't have much to say about the problem of identity, although it would like to.