Narrative Strategies and the persistence of violence in The Pages by Hugo Hamilton

This work investigates the role of violence in Hugo Hamilton’s 2021 novel The Pages, whose narrative structure is extremely original, as the narrator of Hamilton’s work is itself a novel – Rebellion – written by the Jewish author Joseph Roth. Rebellion was published in Berlin in 1924, where it narrowly escaped the Nazi fire of books in May 1933, when students took out books to burn from the State Library in order to cleanse German literature. The novel was saved by a student who was given the book by his literature professor.
The narration intertwines many stories, past and contemporary ones: the story of the novel Rebellion and its own story of survival, the story of its author and his wife, the story of the professor and the story of the young student, with the stories of contemporary people around Lena, a young American woman of German and Irish descent. She is the granddaughter of the student who saved the book in 1933 and continued to save it from further searches both by Nazi forces and the GDR police to the end of his life, managing to keep it in the family.
Hamilton’s novel is about escape and survival, about people who were forced to leave their homes in the past, like Joseph Roth, and people who were forced to leave home in the recent past, like Armin and Madina, who fled Chechnya as children after becoming orphans when Groznyj was severely bombed, and who carry the marks of that violence in their maimed bodies. They were adopted by a German family who taught them to freely express themselves, and now live in Berlin, the city of freedom, but where intolerance has started to simmer again. The Pages shows the recurrence of violence: refugees of the past and refugees of the present, people who managed to survive and people who were and still are put down by violence. Through the different stories it gives voice to, the novel presents a bleak repetition of violence, in different historical conditions. It also subtly reworks recurrent themes in Hamilton’s oeuvre: homelessness and belonging, nationalism and identity, as well as the power of language and stories.
This work will analyse the carefully constructed plot in its several layers of doleful past history impending on the present, but it will also relate the issues explored by Hugo Hamilton in this powerful novel to those recurrent in his production.