From Publishers Weekly
There's no waking from the nightmare of history in this haunting—and sometimes heavy-handed—follow-up to Hamilton's prize-winning memoir,
The Speckled People. The author's coming-of-age in 1960s Dublin is dominated by his mother and father, she an anti-Nazi German immigrant, he an ardent Irish nationalist who bans the English language from their home. In this household, every conversation comes shackled to politics and tragedy—Hamilton's parents even compare Beatlemania to Nazism. No wonder the lad develops a Dostoyevskian guilt complex, forever imagining himself complicit in crimes he didn't commit, and longs "to have no past... no conscience and no memory." He escapes to a harbor-front job, but even there the Troubles loom when his Catholic boss feuds with a Protestant fisherman. The story often sags under the author's determination to set everyday happenings in dire historical context: when Hamilton fishes out a pal who fell into the harbor while retrieving a lobster pot, he immediately wishes, "I could bring others back as well... even those who died in Northern Ireland, even those who died in the Irish famine, or those who had been murdered in the Ukraine." But at his best, Hamilton writes with a wonderfully evocative feeling for character and landscape that brings to life the Ireland he grew up in.
(Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Hamilton's memoir
The Speckled People (2003) was about his childhood in Ireland after World War II as the son of a German mom, who hated Hitler, and a fiercely Irish dad, who hated the British and their language. This sequel about Hugo's coming-of-age finds the boy desperate to escape the burdens of his parents' past but never able to break free, even as he also discovers the riches of his mixed heritage. There are no shallow parallels between the Nazis and the bullying he experiences in the schoolyard, but the sharp vignettes always raise issues about the roles of perpetrators, victims, and especially, bystanders, in history and close to home. Nor is there sweet reconciliation; in fact, the door-slamming family quarrels and the warfare on Dublin streets are what keep you reading. When Dad rages at his son as a nobody and a waster, the teenage Hugo loves it. He wants to be thrown out, even as he is haunted by the atrocities he has heard about and that he cannot stop remembering.
Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
