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Unlike Frank McCourt, whose wretched Irish boyhood was chronicled in the bestselling
Angela's Ashes, Irish novelist Hugo Hamilton did not grow up in a world of excruciating poverty and deprivation. More psychological than physical, Hamilton's youthful misery sprang from the cross-cultural confusion of his home life, a mulligan stew of unhappy contradictions concocted by his intensely nationalistic Irish father and gentle German mother.
In this fine literary memoir, Hamilton describes how he and his siblings were raised in post-WWII Dublin as "speckled people" (half Irish and half something else), forbidden to speak English and forced to dress in lederhosen and Aran sweaters to signify their dual heritage. He focuses a child-sized lens on his tyrannical father, a delusional Irish patriot trapped in the past, who speaks in slogans and fails miserably at every business venture; and his warm, loving mother, a tragic conciliator who emigrated to Ireland to escape the Nazis but who cannot escape her own haunted past.
Unfolding in Joycean rhythms that make it feel more like a novel than an autobiography, The Speckled People captures the baffled incomprehension of a child caught in the cultural crossfire of a war of words -- where language is king but silence prevails, where meaning gets lost in translation, and where the list of things that can't be talked about grows longer every day. Poetic, witty, and bravely unsentimental, it provides a boy's-eye view of what it's like to be a stranger in your own country. Anne Markowski
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Hugo Hamilton's charming book deserves to rank high on the list of distinguished memoirs that, with prodigious craftsmanship, combine the confusion, heartache, and joy of an Irish childhood, yielding incredibly affecting literature.
As the offspring of an Irish father and a German mother, Hamilton is one of Ireland's "speckled people" -- a term coined by his father for those of mixed ethnicity -- who struggle to find their place on the Emerald Isle. Hugo's father, a fierce Irish nationalist, forces his children to speak either Irish or German (but never ever English!), and Hugo finds himself suspended between his parents' competing cultures and histories. His father's grim determination to rebuild an Irish culture independent of the British stands in stark contrast to Hugo's mother, whose warmth and humor belie the ghosts that still haunt her: memories of her own childhood under the ever-encroaching shadow of the Nazis.
Told through the eyes of a child, The Speckled People resonates with a sense of youthful wonder and exuberance, and the simple, unadorned truth. And it perfectly illustrates Hamilton's literary gifts, in a re-creation of a world that is tender and deeply disturbing at the same time. (Summer 2003 Selection)
The Washington Post
Though Hugo Hamilton's story will mesmerize anyone whose identity mixes cultures or marks them as out of place in that place called home, the lyrical power of his writing stamps his story not as journalism but as literature -- and great literature at that. The Speckled People is an astonishing achievement, clearly a landmark in Irish nonfiction; and I cannot shake the conviction that for many years to come, it will be seen as a masterpiece. — Trevor Butterworth
The New York Times
The author of this painful, funny, densely beautiful memoir grew up in a household so at odds with itself and the world around it, the wonder is he was able to piece together any identity for himself at all, let alone write a book of such piercing cogency. As it happens, Hugo Hamilton has written several books -- literary novels as well as a couple of crime thrillers -- and the rare quality of this memoir owes much to his novelistic skills, not least his handling of the child's point of view throughout, with its luminously uncomprehending attentiveness to adult behavior. — James Lasdun
Publishers Weekly
"I know what it's like to lose, because I'm Irish and I'm German," explains Hamilton in this beautiful memoir of a mixed childhood in the years after WWII. Hamilton's father says they are speckled, breac in Gaelic: spotted like a trout. With an Irish father and a German mother, Hamilton comes to Ireland as a boy in the 1950s and finds a homeland that will never fully accept him. Other children call him "Kraut" and "Nazi" and taunt him with "Sieg Heil!" salutes. Yet Hamilton is in many ways more Irish than they. His father never allows him to speak English and insists the family use the Gaelic form of their last name (O hUrmoltaigh), which many of their neighbors can't even pronounce. Despite these efforts, Hamilton knows, "we'll never be Irish enough." There is much in this Irish memoir that's familiar to the genre: the dark, overwhelming father; the tragic mother; the odd mix of patriotism and self-loathing ("the hunger strike and Irish coffee" are the country's greatest inventions, Hamilton's father says). But the book is never clich d, thanks largely to Hamilton's frankly poetic language and masterful portrait of childhood. This is really a book about how children see the world: the silent otherworld at the bottom of a swimming pool, the terror of a swarm of bees, the strangeness of a city transformed by snow. By turns lyrical and elegiac, this memoir is an absorbing record of a unique childhood and a vanishing heritage. (May) Forecast: A blurb from Roddy Doyle, ads in Irish newspapers and an author tour to Boston and New York ensures Hamilton's book will surface on the Irish memoir radar screen. It was published in the U.K. earlier this year and garnered rave reviews. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
In an attempt to deal with his troubled past, novelist Hamilton (Sad Bastard; Headbanger) offers powerful reminiscences of searching for identity while growing up in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s. Half-Irish and half-German (hence "speckled") in an English-speaking society, he and his trilingual siblings were isolated from the world around them. Their father, a fanatic Irish nationalist, allowed no English to be spoken at home; Irish was preferred but German permitted as their mother's language. Because of their German heritage, other children attacked them as Nazis; because they spoke Irish, they were taunted as mired in the country's past. Meanwhile, the mother was wrestling with ghosts from her own past in Nazi Germany, details of which her children learned slowly. Events are reported from a child's perspective in a quasi-stream of consciousness style, reminiscent of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as the obvious point of comparison, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. Despite the seriousness of the content, this compelling book has its share of humor. Highly recommended for all public libraries.-Denise J. Stankovics, Rockville P.L., Vernon, CT Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
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 aNazi 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.
Washington Post
“An astonishing achievement...a landmark in Irish nonfiction…a masterpiece.”
Irish Times
“A wonderful, subtle, problematic and humane book....about Ireland...about a particular family...about alternatives and complexities anywhere.”
Independent
“Evocative, agitating and inspiriting, Speckled People sticks up for diversity and principled dissent...extending the scope of Irish memoir.”
New York Newsday
“A fine reminder that there are many ways of being Irish.”
New York Times Book Review
“Hamilton’s style is an engaging mix of the salty and literary.”
Orlando Sentinel
“A complex and layered story, intriguingly different from all those other Irish-childhood memoirs.”
Philadelphia Inquirer
“Unlike most Irish memoirs, this one is devoid of sentimentality. Which doesn’t make it any the less heartrending. ”
Irish Voice
“Hamilton’s most successful book to date, after building up a fine reputation as a novelist.”
Roddy Doyle
“The most gripping book I’ve read in ages...a fascinating, disturbing and often very funny memoir.”
Daily Telegraph (London)
“A memoir of childhood that often reads like a craftily composed work of fiction.”
GQ
“The long wait for this most talented novelist to cast his eye over his homeland has been worth it.”
