Customer Reviews

Speckled People (Large Print)

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I found The Speckled People after encountering a fascinating article by Hugo Hamilton on the "Loneliness of Being German". Similar to the article, the book immediately struck a chord with me. Those living within and without their own language will find a special connection to this book. Language as the identification of "home" and "country" and "language wars" are explored here in a rather exceptional way - through the voice and outlook of a growing child. Like a patchwork quilt the vignette chapters of the book come together for the reader to form an exquisitely drawn portrait. Hamilton's family is pictured against the backdrop of their Irish reality of poverty and want in the fifties and sixties. Complexities are accentuated by his dual identity as a child of an Irish nationalist father and a German mother who left Germany after the war.

While The Speckled People is an intimately personal chronicle of his youth, Hamilton's story has significance far beyond the autobiography genre. There are advantages and challenges in using the language of a child. On the one hand, experiences can be conveyed in a direct and innocent way. Johannes (Hugo) has not yet learned to query all he observes: "When you're small you know nothing". He is a sensitive and perceptive child who intuits that there are more untold dramas in the family. "You can inherit a secret without even knowing what it is." On the other hand, it may be difficult to maintain the language as the boy's capacity to analyze and reflect becomes more pronounced with age. Hamilton succeeds admirably in keeping his style consistent even where he integrates numerous events from the wider world as they become relevant to the young boy. As you settle into his style, the narrative becomes deeply absorbing.

The experiences of life under Nazi rule as part of an anti-Nazi family, continue to haunt his mother. Her painful memories are conveyed to the son in small doses, like selected scenes from a black and white movie in which she had a part. Nonetheless, she is homesick for her native country and all things German. Books, souvenirs and toys arrive regularly resulting in outbursts of happy laughter. Johannes records his mother's mood swings expressed through either laughter or primarily mental withdrawal and silence.

His father feels more Irish than anybody around them. He insists on preserving Irish culture and on "freeing" the Irish people from British influences. His children become "his weapon" against the enemy. He forbids the family to speak English. The children tend to "live" in German as their mother has difficulties speaking Irish. The Irish language has to be protected even if it means losing business. This can mean that cheques are not accepted from people who cannot spell Ó hUrmoltaigh - Hamilton in Irish. The language is your home, "your country is your language", he insists - it identifies who you are. The pressure on the children to speak German and Irish at home sets them apart from people in Dublin at the time. There, English was the preferred language. The children suffer from this enforced isolation. The neighbourhood bullies, responding to their otherness and German identity call them "Nazi", "Hitler" or "Eichmann". They attack them whenever the opportunity arises. While Johannes repeats to himself and to his mother "I am not a Nazi", he does not defend himself against the assaults. One of the rules of the house is to adopt a form of pacifist resistance, the "silent negative " and not to become part of the "fist people". As Johannes grows up, he understandably rebels increasingly against these strictures. In the end, he discovers his own way out of all the identify confusion, his anger and pain.

The Speckled People is a memoir like no other. Any comparison with other Irish memoirs would seem inappropriate to me. While Hamilton chronicles his childhood and growing up, themes and issues beyond the personal play a fundamental role. In particular his exploration of the complexities of "language" as "home" and "country" gives this book added richness and depth. [Friederike Knabe, Ottawa Canada]

Some reviewers tell the whole story in a paragraph like this, which I will refrain from doing. That would take away the entertainment value of reading the book. Suffice it to say that, of the 50+ books I read a year, this one is one of the top 5 of the year. It has a very interesting voice (a child's perspective), and story (one Irish parent, one German parent, and their children who live in Ireland after WWII) that certainly makes you think about one's place in the world and also one's perspective of history. I highly recommend reading this book.

Hamilton is a journalist, and a writer of short stories and novels. His first three novels were set in Central Europe. Then came Headbanger (1996), a darkly comic crime novel set in Dublin and featuring detective Pat Coyne. A sequel, Sad Bastard, followed in 1998. The Speckled People came out in 2003 to critical acclaim It is an intensely personal memoir about very a political and public issue; what does language mean for national identity in democracies. His was a childhood of "lederhosen and Aran sweaters, smelling of rough wool and new leather, Irish on top and German below" so uniquely lived through two separate struggles represented by his parents. It is also about homesickness; for a dream Ireland, a lost Germany and a homeland of one's own.

Hugo's father wanted an Irish speaking self-sufficient Catholic Ireland. English if spoken by the children resulted in punishments including beating with sticks. He adapted an Irish name that no one could spell and pronounce and refused to answer even his work letters if they failed to write using his English name. Yet he also made toys, read stories and took his family on holiday to West Ireland (much to the amusement of the locals who were tired of the Dublin Intellectuals telling them they were the future when all they wanted was a decent inside toilets and jobs. His nationalism was driven by the shame of a father who had served and died in the British Navy leaving a service pension that funded his university education. He was always on the look out for the next big business deal to make Ireland economically free. But from crosses, toy wagons and tragic Honey they are failures, his only success is the size of his family as it grows year by year. They are the secret weapon to challenge the legacy of Empire.

His mother was a German Catholic, whose father was a conservative opponent of Hitler and whose family were passive resisters throughout the war although one sister was more active in being part of a network of safe houses hiding Jews. She herself as being "people of the head rather then the fist" so eventually rebels against her husband and destroys the canes but otherwise goes along with her husbands dreams and teaches her children German so they becomes fluent in three languages. She also has secrets that unravel as the biography unfolds.

The memoir is not a sentimental Irish story of hope crushed by poverty driven by the drink. The children have a comfortable and warm upbringing drawing on the richness of three culture's music and literature. But being German meant that the children were bullied and taunted as Nazis and they were at a lost to say where they belonged. What drives the story is the voice of the narrator that uses simple sentences and childlike observations, gradually turning to what he knows and understands, as he grows older and so creating a quiet humorous yet honest account of two flawed humans struggling to make a better life for their children in the very different 50s and 60's. An sequel called The Sailor in the Wardrobe was published in 2006.

Memoirs are almost always interesting but this one is like nothing else I had ever read. Truly touching and endlessly interesting, this book has something for everyone. If you have ever felt like an "outsider" you will appreciate Hugo's plight. I couldn't stop reading it. It was a joy until the very last page.

okay... this book is absolutely gorgeous - It is sweet,deep,and dark...an original story. it reads like a beautiful poem -i am so happy to read a new book by an author who writes so well... thank you, Hugo!

Hugo Hamilton's 2003 "The Speckled People" is an under recognized treasure. This warm and evocative memoir spoken in the voice of the young Hamilton recalls his own childhood growing up in Dublin in the 1950 and 60's. Hamilton strikes a balanced tone; melancholy as he and his siblings suffer from bullying, persecution and and alienation and also uplifting and humorous in its goodness of friends and family and simple vignettes. His mother is from Germany. His father is a strident Irish nationalist who requires his children to only speak Irish or German.

To the gangs and thugs that surround his struggling neighborhood they are not the children born in Dublin but Nazis that should be chased and beat upon or put on show trials and executed. There's no assimilation. It is neither the time nor the place for what we now celebrate as multiculturalism.

Tone is important here. Hamilton creates sympathy and empathy for his characters. He, through his young self gives the reader perspective through flashbacks on what life was like for the parents or grandparents going through much more violent times and by remembering the many kinder moments in his childhood. The earlier generations suffered great losses that leave them scared but not traumatized. Particularly Hamilton's mother is a special character unusually adept at defusing her temperamental husband and helping to teach her own children many lessons in tolerance. They will be the "word" people rather than the "fist" people she instructs them. We hear her about her young days in 1930's and WWII Germany and can understand why Hamilton reveres his mother.

What works so well is that Hamilton does not try to make the children's alienation compete with his parents childhood's. Intellectually we know the 1950's were not anything so bad as most of the previous 50 years. Their suffering hurts because we can relate to their innocence and the sorrow of being ostracized, picked on and struggling to find your place in the world.

In the end this is about overcoming adversity, perhaps coming of age and certainly the serenity that comes with challenges overcome. The beauty is Hamilton's balance of the ambiguities of daily life. No culture, town, neighborhood or family is all bad or all good. There are very compassionate people in even those most troubling of circumstances. Hamilton memoir left me feeing good. He's a romantic realist that has taken on life's challenges and made the best of them. And that's always a wonderful lesson.

... observed by a precocious child. That's one way to summarize this book, to empathize with the child narrator and to grasp that the adult writer's deepest intention was to portray his own grief and shame at the discovery that his parents, particularly his father, were Mortal: flawed and futile people who perhaps should never have married and who certainly had no common plan of parenting. The boy Hugo Hamilton remembers himself to have been is wounded, traumatized, for life. His memories strive to pin the rap for his traumata on his environment - Dublin in the 1950s - but the realization of his parents' discord can't be repressed forever. It's that realization that accompanies the narrator's 'maturation' as the book progresses. He needs to mature as a narrator, since he ages eight or ten years as a character in his memoirs, from age four or so to age twelve or fourteen. In fact, the chronology of the boy's aging is deliberately vague in the book, allowing the author to maintain his narrative pose of naivete until the final chapters. It's that naivete that keeps the whole book charming and graceful even while ugly, sordid, and foolish behaviours are reported.

The boy's father is a crank. He's also an idealist. That combination isn't so rare, is it? He's an Irish nationalist, rabidly anti-English, and though his form of patriotism is quixotic it's not ignoble. But he's also a tyrannical father and an abusive husband. The boy will eventually find even nastier secrets in his father's closet. The mother is German, a physical and psychological victim of the Nazi years who comes to Ireland ostensibly to improve her English and who ironically marries a man who won't permit her or their children to speak, hear, read, or think English. We readers will eventually learn that she was raped by her boss in Germany, abused over a period of months, and that she is subjugated more than partnered by the Irish father of her children. She's a perfect case-study of womankind's 'post-traumatic stress disorder'. Author Hamilton only rather evasively acknowledges that much of his story must come directly from her diary; his memories, in other words, are practically hers.

The boy is 'speckled' because he is half German and half Irish, and effectively lost in a 'world' that wants to be all English. His mother dresses him in an Irish cardigan sweater and Lederhosen. His father canes him for any 'trafficking' with the enemy English language or culture. The boys and some adults of his vicinity torment him for being German, taunting him as a Nazi when in fact he is, via his mother, a refugee from Nazidom. Very confusing for a boy of four, five, eight, nine years of age, and inevitably the confusion and ambiguity become integral parts of his identity.

It's gorgeously written, this Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood. The quality of the writing is such that the sorrow of the subject might be overlooked. I have to express thanks to my ama-buddies in Canada, Australia, and Shanghai for dragging my equine attention to the lovely waters of the Irish seas. Once I knew of its existence, this book was an obvious "must-read" for me since I was also a 'speckled child'. My father was Swedish (and a crank) and my mother was German-American. My father never spoke about his motives or reasons for anything, but I think he hauled our little family out of Minnesota after the end of WW2 to escape his and my Germanization within my mother's extended family. Then, in the 1950s, when I was near finishing elementary school, we moved deep into the American South. I was very blond and I probably had an odd accent in English, and I remember being taunted as German (or even worse, as a Yankee). Hamilton writes of a distinction between "fist people" and "word people", and confesses that as a boy he wanted desperately to be one of the "fists". That's one of the many things in "The Speckled People" that I can corroborate.

In `The Speckled People', Hugo Hamilton writes, from a child's perspective, of his Irish childhood. He writes of growing up in a home where the languages spoken were the Irish of his nationalist father and the German of his mother. English was forbidden by his father, who was so obsessed with trying to hold onto his linguistic and cultural heritage that he would not do business with anyone who could not pronounce his Irish name (Ó hUrmoltaigh) correctly.

`Everybody else was in the wrong country and couldn't rescue us.'

Hamilton and his siblings grew up in Dublin during the 1950s and 1960s. His mother, Irmgard Kaiser, left Germany after World War II to go on a pilgrimage to Ireland. She stayed in Ireland, and married Jack Hamilton (who had renamed himself Sean Ó hUrmoltaigh). Jack Hamilton dedicated his life to the anti-British, nationalist cause and particularly to the rehabilitation of the Irish language. His father, who had served and died in the British Navy, was largely (but not entirely) removed from the family record.

The children who mostly dominate the story are Franz, Johannes and Maria, although other siblings are mentioned. It is Johannes who tells this story, and while he signals a future name change, the actual change is not discussed.

`When I grow up I'll run away from my story, too. I have things I want to forget, so I'll change my name and never come back. `

Writing an account from a child's perspective must be challenging for any adult: reading an account written from a child's perspective has advantages and disadvantages. A child can recount what is seen, observed and experienced without necessarily understanding and interpreting the context. A child's account is immediate, whereas distance and age often provide interpretational filters. So, while I enjoyed reading Hugo's account of his childhood, I wanted at times to read his adult interpretation of events. But, it's a memoir rather than a biography and the child Hugo's perspective of the issues of identity and belonging, and the baggage of culture and language are worth reading and thinking about.

`The Speckled People' is a careful return to a complex childhood full of challenges and secrets, overshadowed by present and past personal, national and international conflict. And of all the images in this book, the ones that come first to mind involve the dog that barks at the waves. For me it's a powerful image.

`Maybe your country is only a place that you make up in your own mind.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

In Ireland, words never touch the ground.

The author of this charming (in a bitter-sweet way) childhood memoir grew up to be trilingual: in Dublin, speaking German with his immigrant mother, and Irish with his nationalist father, and English on the sly, as that was the language of the world around him, but father (aka Vati), forbade the enemy language. Mutti, who is an opera singer's daughter, has to sing her English pop songs in secret, to avoid Vati's retribution.

We are in the 1950s, nota bene. The kids in the street call the boy a Nazi (a habit which didn't change much for decades, as so was my daughter called by her British classmates in an American school in the new millennium).

I expected something bleak, like Angela's Ashes, but poverty is not an issue here. The family is not rich, but also not miserable in the 50s. (I remember from my own childhood at the same time in Germany, that there was no misery in the much lower standard of living of the time. Kids are tough anyway. Unless they are not. The demons in the family come from father's patriotic obsession and from mother's dark memories.

This boy is highly aware of language and words. He takes the phrase of the words which don't touch the ground (see my opening line) from an observation of Irish dancing, where feet don't seem to touch ground. He moves between his 3 languages and produces odd ideas outside the box, as kids will. (His style is reminiscent of Irmgard Keun's little girl in A Child of All Nations.)

Men in their fifties, writing, or trying to write, in the voice of their own boyhood selves, are in danger of romantic dishonesty, of quaintness. Hamilton pulls it off. He is credible. This book is enjoyable. I am not sure I gained much new insight, but then again, the book's title alone is a lesson in itself: speckled people, people of mixed birth and culture, my kind of people.

The Irish have no tomorrow, while the Germans have no yesterday. That's why the Germans invent cars and the Irish write stories and poems. But the Irish also invent things, like the hunger strike. (this is a paraphrase, not my words)

The picture of the fists and the words is given by the boy's mother. It is her way to describe what happened in 33: the fists had come to power over the words. Her uncle had been the mayor of a Rhineland town (Kempen), and lost his position when he refused to join the party. The respective Tante, by the way, was of the opinion that one can always tell a decent person by their shoes and hands. But no, says the Uncle: take the radio, it sits there all polite and decent in your front room, and before you knew it, you found yourself agreeing with the most outrageous gossip and resentment. The radio was a scoundrel who never listens, but has nice shoes and hands and music.

Without doubt, Mutti is the top hero. I want to end my review with the last two sentences of the book. They give nothing away but encapsulate the woman well.

"She said she didn't know where to go from here. We were lost, but she laughed and it didn't matter."

This is a magnificent story of the author's growing up in Ireland.It takes place mainly after WW2 and until the mid-seventies.The son of an fanitically nationalistic Irish father who doesn't want to give up the past, and a German mother who is haunted by her past of growing up in Nazi Germany.

The author shows us the tremendous pressures of trying to get along when you are different from others in your community and country.This problem exists everywhere and we learn that it also occurs even in Ireland.This family lived with it as a central issue at all times and no matter how hard they tried,they could never get away from it.I don't think I have ever read a book that so clearly defined the issues and struggles that had to be faced.

Not only has the author described the struggles his family faced he also gives us a great deal of insight into the culture,thinking,perceptions,anguish,and the effect that the past has on the personality and feelings encountered when one is different.

Ireland is a very fascinating country and like no other.One never ceases to be amazed by what one learns by reading about its history and its people;and this book is no exception.

Several lines that really struck me were:

"Some things are not good to know in Ireland."

"We serve neither King nor Kaiser."

"My father says the Irish can't live on imagination forever."

"He doesn't want the song about immigration to go on forever."

"Ireland unfree shall never be at peace."

"Maybe there was no failure in Ireland,only bad luck,and

maybe there was no bad luck in Germany,only failure."

"Nelson's head was on the ground and the dust of the empire

was all around."

"When you're small you know nothing and when you grow up there

are things you don't want to know."

And finally,one that sums up the story:

"I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me."

The author's skill in the use of language is a whole order of magnitude higher than so much we see today;but still in a class with several of his Irish compatriots.What wonderful stuff this small country produces.