Tell us about your new novel, Conversation with the Sea.
It is a break-up song for the world. My response to the present as well as the history from which we have emerged. It is the story of Lukas Dorn, whose failed marriage coincides with a sense of inevitable decline. He is confronted by the memory of the Holocaust, being told at the age of nine how the Nazis tried to erase the evidence of mass graves. He meets a refugee who has fled from a recent zone of horror. The novel places history alongside what is happening now. The erasure of the past and the erasure of the present and the loving impact of hope.
Our reviewer praised its near-perfect beauty and emotional and moral depth and wrote, ‘The novel grapples with a simple question: how to live in this world without numbing oneself to its horrors’. How would you respond?
Ruby Eastwood’s thoughtful review touches on that fundamental condition in which we find ourselves watching present-day horrors up close and at a helpless distance. We acknowledge what is going on and also have a duty to notice what is beautiful in the world.
[ Hugo Hamilton: 'Irish people saw me as this weird child with a German mother'Opens in new window ]
Your book features a German in the west of Ireland, calling to mind Heinrich Böll’s Irish Diary about his time on Achill. How big an influence was he?
My novel is the 21st-century version of Böll’s affectionate travel book from the 1950s. Achill as a place of refuge for Germans. As a German-Irish writer, part visitor and part native, I explore that landscape against the background of my German heritage.
Your mother was German, a heritage beautifully explored in your bestselling memoir The Speckled People, and you’ve spent a lot of time in Germany, set books there and your son lives there. What do you make of it today?
I love my mother’s country and speaking her language. Germany is full of memory and all that homesickness I’ve inherited from her. It remains my maternal home in spite of all its contradictions.
RM Block
Guilt about the Holocaust seems to blind Germany to Israeli atrocities in Gaza. You have said, “Germany is again on the wrong side of history ... the telescope of empathy has been fixed firmly on the past.”
Germans should be the first people on earth to recognise the horrors of Palestine. Instead their memory culture has now become a form of consistent denial of the present.
How has WG Sebald influenced your approach?
If Sebald was alive today he would be writing about Gaza. His work is a literary monument to the victims of Nazi terror. He has said that it is impossible to stare the horror in the eye and that a writer must find more imaginative ways of describing the truth.
A runaway horse in your novel made me think of the title of a Martin Walser novel. Any connection?
My frightened horse is based on a story I heard in the Aran Islands and describes the catastrophe unfolding in the life of my character. The horse escaping into the waves goes on to morph with the image of the screaming horse in Picasso’s famous painting of Guernica.
How is your Irish today?
Tá mé líofa go leor agus ábalta amhrán a rá as Gaeilge. I love speaking Irish, it places me in a less aggressive country, closer to nature, full of musical links to an ancient past.
Which of your fictions is your favourite?
Autobahn – a short story published by the New Yorker last year.
Which projects are you working on?
A stage adaptation of my novel Every Single Minute, the story of Nuala O’Faolain’s final journey to Berlin, set for production next year by Decadent Theatre Company.
[ A novel approach to NualaOpens in new window ]
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I tried to visit the house where Thomas Bernhard lived in Austria but – like one of his novels – I came close and never quite managed to get there.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Stay in your seat.
Who do you admire the most?
Right now – Francesca Albanese.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I would set up a system whereby each European country would adopt a less prosperous country elsewhere in the world.
Which current book, film or podcast would you recommend?
Ezra Klein’s podcast in which Brian Eno describes the impact of AI on music as “munge”, the dipping jar left after painting in watercolours.
Which public event affected you most?
The Berlin Wall going up and coming down.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
A painted Romanian monastery in the snow.
Your most treasured possession?
A brass Russian icon I got from a Canadian priest.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
A bashed-up paperback copy of The Bell Jar given to me by Mary Rose in 1974.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Thomas Bernhard, just to watch him eating a Wiener schnitzel.
The best and worst things about where you live?
Dún Laoghaire, where I walk through my childhood each day and will never get away.
What is your favourite quotation?
Do something useless today – my own words over my desk.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Francie Brady.
A book to make me laugh?
Malone Dies.
A book that might move me to tears?
Malone Dies.
Conversation with the Sea by Hugo Hamilton is published by Hachette Books Ireland
