Deputy Arts Editor Grace Novarr attended a conversation between acclaimed novelists Tóibín and Hamilton, who discussed Hamilton’s recently published novel, The Pages.

The sanctity of books is an important theme throughout history. When books are attacked and destroyed, it often signals the beginning of similar crimes against humanity itself. This is the topic with which Irish authors Colm Tóibín and Hugo Hamilton began their conversation on Wednesday afternoon, which was hosted by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and streamed on Zoom. Hamilton, who currently resides in Berlin, began by describing a monument that he sees regularly: the monument to the burning of the books, on which it reads, “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.” This quote resonates with Hamilton’s latest novel, The Pages, whose subject matter is intimately concerned with issues of book burning and genocide. Indeed, The Pages is narrated by a book –– specifically, Rebellion by Joseph Roth, which was originally published in 1924. Roth, an Austrian Jew, was targeted by the Nazi regime; his books were banned and burned in 1933. The copy of Rebellion that narrates The Pages was spared from the fire in 1933; now, in the present day, it belongs to a woman called Lena Knecht. The story of The Pages unites past and present, raising awareness about the parallels between the 1930s in Germany and the danger that resonates to the present day.

The many themes contained in Hamilton’s unique novel and the history it apprises provided ample subject matter for conversation between Tóibín and Hamilton. Tóibín, a professor of English at Columbia University, is the author of many novels, including Brooklyn and The Magician. Hamilton, author of the memoir The Speckled People, is half-Irish and half-German, and has been awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his contributions to literature and cross-cultural understanding. At the beginning of the conversation, Tóibín and Hamilton spoke of their common Irish background. Hamilton recounted how, as he grew up in Ireland, his father forbade him and the rest of his family from speaking English in their home; only Gaelic and German were allowed. Therefore, Hamilton grew up estranged from the language that was spoken outside his home; as he put it, he found his refuge from the confusion of language within writing. 

Tóibín then asked about Joseph Roth, author of Rebellion. He asked Hamilton if he had been tempted to write a historical novel about Roth. Hamilton described how he had discovered a copy of Rebellion in his uncle’s library that had been rescued from being burned. He thought about “all the people with thumbprints on this book” and decided that he wanted to allow “the book itself to speak.” The life of Roth himself was interesting to Hamilton because Roth represented the ultimate migrant, a refugee who was always forced to be on the run. Tóibín remarked that Roth was probably particularly despicable to Hitler because he was not just Jewish, but also had a particular frame of mind that represented a “great new Europe,” a vision that contradicted Hitler’s despotic aspirations. Hamilton read a section of The Pages that described Roth, and spoke about Roth’s propensity to wander about and take watches apart at home, habits that drove his partner, Friedl Roth, crazy. 

The conversation moved to the topic of how novelists represent tragedy and atrocity. Hamilton said that he agreed with the novelist Sebald’s view that “you cannot write about the Holocaust directly.” It was important to Hamilton to write the story with a narrator who wasn’t himself, but rather had a more otherworldly quality. Of the novelist, Hamilton said, “he’s not unlike the child that I was, narrating The Speckled People.” The narrator of The Pages understands the world at an “oblique angle,” but also as a character in that world, characterized by innocence and naivete. Hamilton then read a passage from the opening of The Pages, establishing that the narrator is a physical book, residing at the moment in someone’s luggage before a flight. 

“I’ve always had the idea of books as living things; they tell our stories, they hold our memories,” said Hamilton. He talked about how a book makes an interesting narrator because it lacks control over other people and over itself. This complete lack of autonomy restricts its ability to engage with the plot, and makes it the ultimate observer’s point of view. As “a helpless witness to the world,” the book is able to narrate the story of atrocity from a point of view that lacks agency, which gives it a unique moral quality in troubled times.

At a certain point in The Pages, the book has to be smuggled back to its original owner, a professor; to accomplish this, it is hidden within another book, the German classic Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane. This literalizes the theme of “layers,” which, according to Tóibín, is key to The Pages. He asked Hamilton about the layer involving the life of Joseph Roth himself, admiring how Hamilton had evaded making Roth purely a victim by nuancing the portrait of Roth’s personal life and marriage. According to Tóibín, the book “moves from being a drama about a very torn fellow to being about someone who’s on the run from serious danger.”  Hamilton described Roth’s marriage to his wife, Friedl, who eventually became schizophrenic and was committed to a psychiatric institution. Roth once crossed a hostile country to see his partner in her padded cell, and slept next to her on the floor of their padded cell in a remarkable gesture of intimacy and devotion, though Hamilton noted that this action reflected Roth’s tendency to see his own life as a drama that he was living.

Tóibín then spoke about the book Rebellion, whose plot follows the downfall and decline of a man who has returned from the first World War. Hamilton noted that it’s interesting that Rebellion was published in 1924, one year before Kafka’s The Trial, given the thematic similarities between the two novels. Tóibín also noted the similarities between Rebellion and Ulysses, given the theme of wandering. Hamilton reiterated that he was interested in depicting vagrants and refugees, people who wander with no home.

Next, Tóibín highlighted the significance of the fact that The Pages is set in the present day; he said there was a sense in which “this represents the survival, somehow, of some notion of civilization, of some notion of the survival of the ironic in literary tone, a novel that might have been very uncomfortable for people to read in 1924… the dangers to a book represent great dangers.” Hamilton agreed, and discussed the fact that in our contemporary era, we have once again entered a time in which books need “protectors.” He alluded to the hostility against books by, for example, Toni Morrison, displayed by right-wing factions of our society. “There are subtle ways in which universities are being dismantled all the time,” he said. “Arts are the true battleground for the truth.”

Tóibín steered the conversation to talk about Hamilton’s literary style. He praised the quality of “restraint” which he claimed was evident in Hamilton’s work since his very first book. In Hamilton’s writing, the dramas that he recounts are side stories that the reader has to particularly attend to. Tóibín expressed appreciation that in The Pages, Hamilton avoided entering the realm of lurid melodrama by not giving his narrator, the book, overly sensationalized feelings. The book remains a neutral quiet observer; the passions are left to the humans that the book observes, particularly the characters of Lena and her lover Armin. Hamilton mentioned a particular passage that he was proud of, in which Lena uses fridge magnets to touch the shrapnel wounds in Armin’s body. He said that he felt writing such scenes to be more subtle and effective than describing a sex scene, for example.

The conversation turned to Hamilton’s writing process. He said that he writes in the morning: “The usual route is porridge, then straight to the desk.” Describing how he was able to interweave past and present in his narrative, he talked about living in Berlin and how, when perambulating the city, it’s impossible to avoid “stepping into the past and the present at the same time.” Not only a city full of monuments, Berlin is itself a monument. 

On the topic of identity, Tóibín asked Hamilton if he thinks of himself as an Irish person or if his identity is more muddled than that. Hamilton replied that he tries to be at home in a lot of different places, but often finds himself ending up in a “vagrant” place in his mind. The daily migration that he performed as a child, moving from a home where English was forbidden out into a world where English was spoken regularly, has become an ingrained mental process for him. Tóibín noted that the concept of Irishness itself is something that must be thrown into question; Hamilton concurred, noting that his father’s strict worldview about Irish people had always been constricting to him. He said, “Irishness is something that comes to you when you’re going abroad; when you arrive in New York, that’s when you become Irish.” 

Finally, Tóibín read some questions from the audience. Answering a question about whether Roth’s writer friends appear in the novel, Hamilton affirmed that Stefan Zweig makes an appearance. To another question about whether he felt that he had to “consciously liberate the narrator,” Hamilton replied that he did feel as if he was liberating the book by bringing it back to life, becoming its protector and safeguarding it back to the present day. 

The conversation closed with a return to the subject of banned books. Tóibín described finding three banned books in his home when he was growing up. He declared, “The Irish people are the greatest storytellers in the world, but very often nothing is being said.” According to Tóibín, the most courageous writers were those who told the true story of Ireland in their novels, even when it was difficult for their Irish audiences to take. Hamilton remembered how influential the book The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass was for him, and the two authors reminisced on a time that they had met Grass in London in 1991. They spent a few minutes expressing admiration for Grass’s political outspokenness, and his willingness to question the security of democracy at a time when people were convinced that all threats to democracy had been defeated. In light of shifting political climates across Europe and America, those who expressed trepidation 30 years ago now seem prescient. 

Tóibín ended the talk by emphasizing that he saw The Pages as an example of the novel form at its most open, a demonstration of just how much can be done with the novel form. Hamilton emphasized that as a novelist, he sought out books that describe life without an overemphasis on plot: “people’s lives are enough plot.” 

The Pages by Hugo Hamilton is available from Penguin Random House. 

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