Surrogate City

by Hugo Hamilton

Set in West Berlin in the 1970s, this novel tells the story of a young Irish man who falls in love with Helen, also from Ireland. It charts a love story that runs its course among the misfits of a city where human contact is remote, overshadowed by the force of state boundaries and the Berlin Wall.

Genres: Germany

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 19, 1991

About the author

Hugo Hamilton is an Irish writer.

Hamilton's mother was a German who travelled to Ireland in 1949 for a pilgrimage, married an Irishman, and settled in the country. His father was a militant nationalist who insisted that his children should speak only German or Irish, but not English, a prohibition the young Hugo resisted inwardly. "The prohibition against English made me see that language as a challenge. Even as a child I spoke to the walls in English and secretly rehearsed dialogue I heard outside," he wrote later.

As a consequence of this, he grew up with three languages - English, Irish and German - and a sense of never really belonging to any: "There were no other children like me, no ethnic groups that I could attach myself to".

Hamilton became a journalist, and then 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.

Following a year spent in Berlin on a cultural scholarship, he completed his memoir of childhood, The Speckled People (2003), which went on to achieve widespread international acclaim. Telling the story through the eyes of his childhood self, it painfully evoked the struggle to make sense of a bizarre adult world. It "triumphantly avoids the Angela's Ashes style of sentimental nostalgia and victim claims," wrote Hermione Lee in the The Guardian . "The cumulative effect is to elevate an act of scrupulous remembering into a work of art," commented James Lasdun in the New York Times. The story is picked up in the 2006 volume, The Sailor in the Wardrobe.

In May 2007, German publisher Luchterhand published Die redselige Insel (The Talkative Island), in which Hamilton retraced the journey Heinrich Böll made in Ireland that was to be the basis of his bestselling book Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) in 1957. Hamilton's most recent novel, Disguise was published on June 6, 2008.

Hugo Hamilton lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ham...

Reviews

[Damien Travel · Rating 4 out of 5]

« Surrogate City » is the first novel written by the Irish writer Hugo Hamilton who lived for a long time in Berlin. It was published in 1990, just after the fall of the Wall, but this story in which human relationships appear as distant and temporary is set in the 70s. Helen, an Irish girl, met a German, Dieter in Dublin. She doesn’t know much about him, except that he left her pregnant. She arrives in Berlin to try to find him and tell him that he will become a father. But she has a hard time finding Dieter who seems elusive and Helen is welcomed by Hadja, the wife and manager of Wolf, a popular musician. The narrator, also from Ireland, is Wolf’s sound engineer. He gets to know Helen and helps her searching for Dieter. But he remains impossible to find. The sound engineer falls in love with Helen and offers himself as surrogate father. Until Dieter reappears and takes Helen to Ireland.

http://www.travelreadings.org/2019/04...

[Tom Hudak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the narrator's outsider vantage point to the relationships in the novel and the sardonic depictions of consumer culture. A really good first novel about choices and the part that chance plays in forming relationships. Also made me nostalgic for Berlin and my early 30's.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

OK story, some interesting insight into Berlin.