[PKG]∎ Download The Speckled People A Memoir of a HalfIrish Childhood Hugo Hamilton 9780007156634 Books

The Speckled People A Memoir of a HalfIrish Childhood Hugo Hamilton 9780007156634 Books

Download As PDF : The Speckled People A Memoir of a HalfIrish Childhood Hugo Hamilton 9780007156634 Books

The Speckled People A Memoir of a HalfIrish Childhood Hugo Hamilton 9780007156634 Books

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.


Tags : The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood [Hugo Hamilton] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. We wear Aran Sweaters and Lederhosen. We are forbidden from speaking English. We are trapped in a language war. We are the Speckled People. In one of the most original memoirs to emerge in years,Hugo Hamilton,The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood,Harper Perennial,0007156634,General,Germany,Ireland,Reading Group Guide,20th Century English Novel And Short Story,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY General,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Personal Memoirs,Biography & Autobiography,Biography Autobiography,BiographyAutobiography,Dublin (Ireland) - Languages,Dublin (Ireland) - Social life and customs,Ethnic Sociology,Germans - Ireland - Family relationships,Hamilton, Hugo - Childhood and youth,Nationalists - Ireland - Family relationships,Novelists, Irish - 20th century,Personal Memoirs,Refugees - Ireland - Family relationships,BIO000000,BIO026000

The Speckled People A Memoir of a HalfIrish Childhood Hugo Hamilton 9780007156634 Books Reviews

... 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.
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.