Hugo Hamilton
Список книг автора Hugo HamiltonDublin Palms
The palm trees give the street a holiday atmosphere. There must be something in the soil they like. They have straight leaves that get a bit ragged, with split ends. At night you hear them rattling in the wind.The narrator of Dublin Palms has returned to Dublin to set up home with his partner Helen and their two children. Their lives are filled with optimism, but also a sense of dislocation. Overshadowed by the Troubles in the North, their family enterprise begins to come apart. As the creditors line up to be paid, they must consider leaving everything behind. What will they gain when they stand to lose all?In this spectacular novel from the author of The Speckled People, a family tries to hold on in a falling world. It is a powerful story of fragmentation and belonging, of emigrants and people returning home.
The Speckled People
‘This is the most gripping book I've read in ages … It is beautifully written, fascinating, disturbing and often very funny.’ Roddy DoyleThe childhood world of Hugo Hamilton, born and brought up in Dublin, is a confused place. His father, a sometimes brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic, while his mother, a softly spoken German emigrant who has been marked by the Nazi past, speaks to them in German. He himself wants to speak English. English is, after all, what the other children in Dublin speak. English is what they use when they hunt him down in the streets and dub him Eichmann, as they bring him to trial and sentence him to death at a mock seaside court.Out of this fear and guilt and often comical cultural entanglements, he tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and turn the twisted logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation, but not before he uncovers the long-buried secrets that lie at the bottom of his parents wardrobe.In one of the finest books to have emerged from Ireland in many years, the acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton has finally written his own story – a deeply moving memoir about a whole family's homesickness for a country they can call their own.
Dublin Palms
Dublin Palms is a moving examination of fatherhood and families across the world, a story of emigrants and strangers and people returning.The seafront was full of memory, full of sand and sex and shivering and wet bathing costumes pooled on the ground. Everything was familiar, the hedges with purple flowers, the granite pier, the lighthouse…You can be bullied by things you love.Sean has returned to Dublin from Berlin. He feels a constant dislocation, never quite arriving in his place of birth. Everything comes to him in a confusion of three languages.Irish: the ghost language, the one his father spoke, the one added to road signs, the one in which they sing the old songs of leaving. German: his mother’s tongue, with its distance and its dark history. And English: the language of the street, the language his father barred from the home, the language he now lives in with his partner Helen and their two children.In this spectacular novel from the author of The Speckled People, Sean attempts to build his own version of home, one that is made of stories and memory, one that is under constant threat of falling apart.
