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Hugo Hamilton has the kind of exquisitely vivid and detailed memory that can bring one peace or drive one mad.
Hamilton appears to be on the mend, healing through his writing.
In his latest memoir, The Harbor Boys, the Dublin-born author has produced a sequel to his heralded The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood with an intricate and intimate examination of the personal, cultural and historical forces that played tug-of-war with his soul.
"I am the son of a German woman who was shamed in front of the world and the son of an Irishman who is refusing to surrender to the British," he writes.
Harbor Boys is framed around one life-illuminating summer when Hamilton worked as a young man on the local docks. Buffeted in the wake of World War II, fighting his own war at home, he yearned to escape "the hurt mind" that dominated family life and to ride the new wave of the 1960s to freedom.
But Hamilton was in lockdown in a home where his firebrand Gaelic father considered speaking English tantamount to treason and found a Beatles record as offensive as Nazi propaganda. That left the task to Hamilton's mother, as he remembers it so poignantly, to play ambassador while the "door-slamming wars" raged on.
Much of the memoir is divided between Hamilton's home life and his redolent experiences at the local harbor he hoped would be a refuge, but instead turned out to be another battleground, this time featuring two fishermen -- one Catholic, the other Protestant.
It is a cousin of Hamilton's who manages to disappear somewhere along the West Coast of Ireland. But there is never a doubt the author's determination to shed the guilt of his ancestral past is the real journey.
Rather than look back in anger as an adult, however, Hamilton speaks in enlightened tones while maintaining the raw innocence and intolerance of the young man he used to be.
"They want us to keep all that history in our heads," he says about his parents' approach to raising their children -- as if the kids were time-traveling witnesses to the past. "But you can't remember something that you have not seen with your own eyes."
His family wasn't so profoundly different from many others. Secrets were buried in bedroom wardrobes, relatives near and far were sometimes exiled, and personal histories methodically erased when deemed necessary.
Still, as Hamilton points out, "I know there is no place to hide from your memory and no place to hide from your own name. It will come after you, following you down the street, on the bus ... your own name following you like a curse."
The Harbor Boys is infused with such deeply affecting passages of pain and joy, love and longing, deep denial and, finally, acceptance.
In navigating such turbulent emotional waters, Hamilton proves himself yet again a writer able to touch thousands of hearts as he delves deep into his own.
The Harbor Boys: A Memoir
By Hugo Hamilton
HarperCollins, 272 pp., $24.95
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