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Dublin 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 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.
280 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 2, 2019
9 people are currently reading
78 people want to read
About the author
Hugo Hamilton
38 books92 followersHugo 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...
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...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 11, 2019
Many Irish novels are about emigration following “troubles” ranging from the great famine to the rebellion, the great depression and the more recent troubles in the north but this novel adds the considerable irony of the main character's immigration from Germany. The title, with its unlikely palms struggling to survive the Dublin climate, encapsulates Hugo's life there in which he struggles to not be “an impersonator” of his Irish, English speaking father and to survive being the carrier of his German mother's stories of life in Nazi Germany where she worked for a Nazi who probably raped her to cause the abortion she had suffered. “Does your memory ever grow up?” he asks himself.
The other, more powerful fact, symbolised by Hamilton, the author, is Hugo's silence in his family home, where he, the present tense narrator feels that “the house was full of love and misunderstanding”. Additional levels of irony are felt by Hamilton giving him employment in a dark basement making and selling recordings of the few remaining singers using the Gaelic language to record the folk history of the Irish past. He has become expert in Gaelic but lives in a world “war of languages” in which he has “the feeling that I am not fully consenting to the place where I live”.
The immediacy of the present tense narration has me feeling as if Hugo is speaking directly to me as I feel his male rage “striking fear into others to stop the fear in ourselves”. Despite the love of his wife, Helen and his loving care of his two young daughters, his unbearable silence remains, even after Helen has succeeded in getting him to resign from his job and become the house parent while she earns a precarious income from giving yoga classes and (more irony) talking on breakfast radio (she trained as an actor).
Balancing this intimate reading of the main character is the lack of dialog so I receive all information only from Hugo, about his current life and his reporting of his unrelenting recollections of his mother's memories of world war II and the aftermath in the ruins of Germany. As his life disintegrates towards bankruptcy, he recalls that the Gaelic word for “to be short of money, is to be naked”. However, Hamilton's considerable achievement with this novel is that, despite some confusion in reading the first quarter of the stories, I enjoyed the several levels that he suggests, from the silence that all wives complain about in their husbands, the male rage of frustration, the Micawber-like hope in the face of poverty to the other meta-fictional aspect of the character's desperate search for a language by which he can be heard. The advice to “write like a man on a bike with no brakes”, was not helpful.
Hamilton has written nine novels, two memoirs and two plays and won numerous European awards. He is a fine writer and I look forward to reading some of these.
The other, more powerful fact, symbolised by Hamilton, the author, is Hugo's silence in his family home, where he, the present tense narrator feels that “the house was full of love and misunderstanding”. Additional levels of irony are felt by Hamilton giving him employment in a dark basement making and selling recordings of the few remaining singers using the Gaelic language to record the folk history of the Irish past. He has become expert in Gaelic but lives in a world “war of languages” in which he has “the feeling that I am not fully consenting to the place where I live”.
The immediacy of the present tense narration has me feeling as if Hugo is speaking directly to me as I feel his male rage “striking fear into others to stop the fear in ourselves”. Despite the love of his wife, Helen and his loving care of his two young daughters, his unbearable silence remains, even after Helen has succeeded in getting him to resign from his job and become the house parent while she earns a precarious income from giving yoga classes and (more irony) talking on breakfast radio (she trained as an actor).
Balancing this intimate reading of the main character is the lack of dialog so I receive all information only from Hugo, about his current life and his reporting of his unrelenting recollections of his mother's memories of world war II and the aftermath in the ruins of Germany. As his life disintegrates towards bankruptcy, he recalls that the Gaelic word for “to be short of money, is to be naked”. However, Hamilton's considerable achievement with this novel is that, despite some confusion in reading the first quarter of the stories, I enjoyed the several levels that he suggests, from the silence that all wives complain about in their husbands, the male rage of frustration, the Micawber-like hope in the face of poverty to the other meta-fictional aspect of the character's desperate search for a language by which he can be heard. The advice to “write like a man on a bike with no brakes”, was not helpful.
Hamilton has written nine novels, two memoirs and two plays and won numerous European awards. He is a fine writer and I look forward to reading some of these.
May 24, 2019
Very enjoyable read, although I felt parts of the book moved too slowly and could have done with more careful editing.
March 10, 2025
English review below the Greek one...
Καταλαβαίνω ότι αυτό το βιβλίο βασίζεται εν μέρει σε πραγματικές εμπειρίες του Hugo Hamilton και αγγίζει θέματα όπως η κρίση ταυτότητας, ο στόχος για την αίσθηση του ανήκειν, τα οικογενειακά τραύματα και πολλά άλλα.
Το πρόβλημα είναι ότι δεν μπορούσα να δω ακριβώς προς ποια κατεύθυνση πήγαινε το βιβλίο ή τι ακριβώς προσπάθησε να πετύχει ο συγγραφέας. Υπάρχει μια ελάχιστη πλοκή, που δεν μου φάνηκε αρκετά συνεκτική, για την οικογενειακή ζωή του αφηγητή, αποσπασματικές αναφορές στη ζωή των συγγενών της γυναίκας του και των δικών του συγγενών, κάποιες αναφορές σε ένα ευρύτερο πλαίσιο των ιστορικών γεγονότων και ούτω καθεξής...
Κατά βάση, το βιβλίο είχε πολύ αργό ρυθμό και δεν ήταν ιδιαίτερα ελκυστικό. Κάποια πράγματα που θα περίμενα να είχαν ειπωθεί για να εξηγήσουν τη σχέση του αφηγητή με τη σύζυγό του έμειναν ανείπωτα, έτσι ως αναγνώστης δεν μπορούσα να επενδύσω ή να εστιάσω σε αυτό το μέρος του βιβλίου. Μετά, κάποιες αναφορές στις ιστορίες και τη δυναμική των άλλων μελών της οικογένειας δεν αναπτύχθηκαν αρκετά για να επικεντρωθεί κανείς εκεί, οι αναφορές σε διαφορετικές ιστορικές περιόδους μοιάζαν ασύνδετες και άστοχες με τον τρόπο που ο συγγραφέας προσπάθησε να τις προσεγγίσει, μερικά πράγματα για τις γλώσσες και τη σωματικότητα και δεν ξέρω τι άλλο πέρασαν και δεν ακούμπησαν...
Ο συγγραφέας μπορεί να γράφει όμορφα μερικές φορές και με ενδιέφερε να ακολουθήσω κάποιες ροές της αφήγησης ή νεύματα προς αυτό και εκείνο, αλλά τα νήματα χάθηκαν γρήγορα και τα νεύματα ήταν ένα είδος ψευδούς συναγερμού. Είχε δυνατότητες, αλλά τελικά ήταν απλώς ένα ασύνδετο και περίεργο βιβλίο...
My understanding is that this book partly refers to Hugo Hamilton's real life experiences and touches on themes such as identity crisis, an aim for a sense of belonging, family trauma and more.
The thing is that I couldn't quite see what direction the book was going or what the author tried to achieve exactly. There is a minimal plot that didn't feel quite cohesive to me about the narrator's family live and his struggles, fragments of his wife's relatives and his own relatives' life stories, some references to the wider frame of historical events and so on...
For the most part the book had a very slow pace though and wasn't that much capticating. Major parts of what should have been said to explain the relashionhip of the narrator with his wive was left unsaid, so as a reader I couldn't quite invest or focus or get this part of the book. Then some mention of other family members' history and dynamics wasn't developed enough to focus there, the touch on different historical periods felt all over the place the way the author tried to approach it, some things about the languages and the physicality and I don't know what didn't add up to much for me.
The author can write nicely at times and I was interested to follow some threads or nods towards this and that, but the threads were quickly lost and the nods were kind of a false alarm. It had potential, but it was simply a disjointed and weird read...
Καταλαβαίνω ότι αυτό το βιβλίο βασίζεται εν μέρει σε πραγματικές εμπειρίες του Hugo Hamilton και αγγίζει θέματα όπως η κρίση ταυτότητας, ο στόχος για την αίσθηση του ανήκειν, τα οικογενειακά τραύματα και πολλά άλλα.
Το πρόβλημα είναι ότι δεν μπορούσα να δω ακριβώς προς ποια κατεύθυνση πήγαινε το βιβλίο ή τι ακριβώς προσπάθησε να πετύχει ο συγγραφέας. Υπάρχει μια ελάχιστη πλοκή, που δεν μου φάνηκε αρκετά συνεκτική, για την οικογενειακή ζωή του αφηγητή, αποσπασματικές αναφορές στη ζωή των συγγενών της γυναίκας του και των δικών του συγγενών, κάποιες αναφορές σε ένα ευρύτερο πλαίσιο των ιστορικών γεγονότων και ούτω καθεξής...
Κατά βάση, το βιβλίο είχε πολύ αργό ρυθμό και δεν ήταν ιδιαίτερα ελκυστικό. Κάποια πράγματα που θα περίμενα να είχαν ειπωθεί για να εξηγήσουν τη σχέση του αφηγητή με τη σύζυγό του έμειναν ανείπωτα, έτσι ως αναγνώστης δεν μπορούσα να επενδύσω ή να εστιάσω σε αυτό το μέρος του βιβλίου. Μετά, κάποιες αναφορές στις ιστορίες και τη δυναμική των άλλων μελών της οικογένειας δεν αναπτύχθηκαν αρκετά για να επικεντρωθεί κανείς εκεί, οι αναφορές σε διαφορετικές ιστορικές περιόδους μοιάζαν ασύνδετες και άστοχες με τον τρόπο που ο συγγραφέας προσπάθησε να τις προσεγγίσει, μερικά πράγματα για τις γλώσσες και τη σωματικότητα και δεν ξέρω τι άλλο πέρασαν και δεν ακούμπησαν...
Ο συγγραφέας μπορεί να γράφει όμορφα μερικές φορές και με ενδιέφερε να ακολουθήσω κάποιες ροές της αφήγησης ή νεύματα προς αυτό και εκείνο, αλλά τα νήματα χάθηκαν γρήγορα και τα νεύματα ήταν ένα είδος ψευδούς συναγερμού. Είχε δυνατότητες, αλλά τελικά ήταν απλώς ένα ασύνδετο και περίεργο βιβλίο...
My understanding is that this book partly refers to Hugo Hamilton's real life experiences and touches on themes such as identity crisis, an aim for a sense of belonging, family trauma and more.
The thing is that I couldn't quite see what direction the book was going or what the author tried to achieve exactly. There is a minimal plot that didn't feel quite cohesive to me about the narrator's family live and his struggles, fragments of his wife's relatives and his own relatives' life stories, some references to the wider frame of historical events and so on...
For the most part the book had a very slow pace though and wasn't that much capticating. Major parts of what should have been said to explain the relashionhip of the narrator with his wive was left unsaid, so as a reader I couldn't quite invest or focus or get this part of the book. Then some mention of other family members' history and dynamics wasn't developed enough to focus there, the touch on different historical periods felt all over the place the way the author tried to approach it, some things about the languages and the physicality and I don't know what didn't add up to much for me.
The author can write nicely at times and I was interested to follow some threads or nods towards this and that, but the threads were quickly lost and the nods were kind of a false alarm. It had potential, but it was simply a disjointed and weird read...
February 16, 2020
Completely lost in what the author is trying to achieve with this book. A poor imitation of his previous book. Reads like a meandering self indulgent memoir.
May 3, 2021
Not one to stay on the shelf.
Very disappointed.
Very disappointed.
September 26, 2022
An unusual writing style that took a while to get used to. Past events are written in the present tense as if they are currently happening. Confusing at times but effective. Beautifully written.
February 28, 2023
More of a 2.5!
August 29, 2023
I really really wanted to love this and did appreciate a lot of the sentiments in it, especially about displacement and language but it was just painstakingly boring
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews