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Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. HTML:A Pulitzer Prizeâ??winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland. "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachyâ??exasperating, irresponsible, and beguilingâ??does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighborsâ??yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness. Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks o… (more)
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"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than
Frank McCourt's account of his deprived childhood manages to maintain humour, whilst not losing the pathos in the more tragic events in his childhood (including the loss of siblings and the absence of a feckless father).
Although there has been some controversy regarding the veracity of these memoirs, I feel sure it is an accurate reflexion of the sort of conditions many experienced in Ireland in the early part of the 20th century. The brutality of the Catholic church (as well as some more compassionate moments), also rings true.
Frank McCourt is very much a story-teller, and the book is very readable.
Despite the difficult conditions of his childhood, McCourt manages to inject humor into this memoir. Very compelling.
Angela's Ashes is driven by two strong questions. First, I know that Frank McCourt is now a famous author and a much lauded teacher, and so I know that he dragged himself out of it, through the typhoid and the starvation and the infections and rags, and out into a better place in the world. So the first question of the book is, How did that happen? The second question, implied by the title, is that the mother (Angela) will die. So how is that going to happen? That's the second question. The magic of this particular engine, this particular method of making me turn the pages, is that these questions are never overtly stated in the text, there isn't a "Now that I'm a teacher, I remember back when I was an urchin..." and we don't have any foreshadowing of the mother's death, or any foreshadowing of anything. Those questions that drove me insane with curiosity (How could he survive this? How could he?) were just buried in the fact that the book existed at all, and had that title.
The other genius thing about this book is that the story has no "Now that I'm older and wiser and understand the world" type of context. Everything that happens in the story is filtered only through the consciousness of the main character at exactly that age in his life, whether it's that an angel brings babies and lays them on the stairs, or whether it's that the life of a messenger boy is the best he can hope for, or whether it's that devils will poke him with pitchforks for eternity, or whether it's one line of Shakespeare that infiltrates his education, we only see everything from right inside the character's point of view. Never the author, never the character later in life, only in the moment.
Rather than making the facts of the book more palatable, because the character knows no better, this way of narrating the story actually makes it the more horrifying, because there's no author to step in and say, "And that's just how poor we were, that we had to burn the walls of our rooms, how sad, how dreadful." Which leaves the reader to think it. And there's no author to say, "And with that one line of Shakespeare, the whole possibility of language as art was lit up in me," it's left to the reader to discover that connection for himself.
Brilliant writing, I mean, obviously, I have nothing to say that's not worshipful. Amazing, brilliant, fearful, desperate, grand.
The first hour was torturously boring. Sadly, the book became more interesting as the tragedies started occurring.
As a mom, I cannot fathom how Angela was able to get through the heartaches
It was particularly poignant to hear the story narrated by the author. I felt as though he was in the room, sitting beside me, tell me his story.
I was not satisfied with the ending…I want to know what happens next! Frank had to beg, borrow, and steal to get to America; how did his behaviour change (or not) after he got there? Did he send money back to help out his mother and brothers? Did they stay in Ireland or come to America as well? Whatever happened to his father?
I realize now that there is a sequel called ‘Tis, which I feel compelled to read. I watched the movie after reading the book, and I thought it was very well done and lived up to how I had pictured things in my mind.
MY RATING: 4 stars!
I was deeply affected reading about the struggles of the McCourt family--father Malachy, mother Angela and children Frank, Malachy, Oliver, Eugene and Margaret. There has never been, nor will there ever be, as personal a portrait of poverty as this one.
Life--in the form of the Irish addiction to a wee bit o' drink--has beaten down the elder Malachy until he is no longer able to provide for the family. Father flees to find work in England but neglects to send any money home, leaving his wife and children, already living in squalor, to further fend for themselves. They steal and beg and tear wood from the walls to burn in the stove. They get their nourishment from tea so weak it's just colored water. They live like sardines in a flat so miserable that every year they have to cram themselves into an upstairs room when winter floods and overflowing toilets make the place only half-habitable.
The memoir--an astoundingly detailed recollection--is a series of vignettes of poverty, cruel schoolmasters, and disease and death. Frank survives (just barely) an existence so horrible that it would have given Dickens nightmares.
"Angela's Ashes" would not be the phenomenal success it is without the poignant voice of Frank McCourt. Seldom have I read an author who can take me from tears to laughter in the same sentence. The prose is gritty, realistic and never self-pitying.
McCourt spent most of his life composing this memoir and such patient devotion definitely shows through. Each page, each sentence is carefully crafted to paint a vivid word picture. Here, for instance, is our introduction to the streets of Limerick:
"From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried: tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. In pubs, steam rose from damp bodies and garments to be inhaled with cigarette and pipe smoke laced with the stale fumes of spilled stout and whiskey and tinged with the odor of p*ss wafting in from the outdoor jakes where many a man puked up his week's wages."
I'm sure the Limerick Tourist Association is not sending McCourt any love letters these days. Still, it's possible to see the author's nostalgic attachment to the city--if only as a benchmark of the place where he triumphed over bad luck, disease and indigence.
McCourt is as clear-eyed when it comes to describing the people in his life. Just take a look at our initial introduction to the wayward head of the house:
"My father, Malachy McCourt, was born on a farm in Toome, County Antrim. Like his father before, he grew up wild, in trouble with the English, or the Irish, or both. He fought with the Old IRA and for some desperate act he wound up a fugitive with a price on his head. When I was a child I would look at my father, the thinning hair, the collapsing teeth, and wonder why anyone would give money for a head like that."
The prose is never flowery or padded. It gallops forward in a breathless stream of consciousness that will have you alternately wanting to take it slow to savor each word, while rushing ahead to see what's next. To speed your eyes along the page, McCourt dispenses with quotation marks, like another favorite writer of mine, Cormac McCarthy. The style can be off-putting at first, but you'll soon find yourself rocking in the rhythm of his gentle Irish lilt.
Save for the closing pages when Frank finally escapes Ireland and boards a boat for America, there is no relief from the grim, unrelenting struggle of this family. But McCourt always manages to find humor and joy even in the darkest hours.
As he writes in the opening paragraphs, "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while." While I would never wish hard times on anyone, I'm glad they visited Frank McCourt. We are all the richer for his miserable childhood.
After the tragic loss of his 7-week-old
Frank's father is a drunkard from Northern Ireland who can't keep a job longer than the third paycheck, and even the dole money he is given when out of work winds up going to drink rather than to feeding his family. They live with fleas, in a unit that floods on the lower level, forcing them to spend much of their time upstairs.
The reader finds out about the peculiar prejudice of the southern Irish against those of the North, easily distinguishable by their accents, and also about the injustice bred by poverty. We see Frank and his family going hungry while other families eat, and Frank wishing that someone else could be his mother simply because then he could always have mashed potatoes or soup. Siblings sicken and die, and his mother is shamefully reduced to begging for scraps to feed her children. Other fathers go to England to work, as does Frank's father, but, unlike the other fathers, no money is sent to his family. In spite of Frank's intelligence and the recommendation of his schoolmaster, Frank is turned away as an altar boy due to his poverty, and other doors are closed to him as well.
In spite of it all, there is hope and laughter in this novel. There are people we want to punch, and people we want to hug. There is the small joy of having enough to buy a piece of candy or go to the movie, and the larger joy of sometimes having a full meal or a couple of coins in your pocket.
This is a tug-at-your-heart, in your face look at a hardscrabble life that many of us couldn't imagine, written by someone who falls in love with the words of Shakespeare and with Wodehouse novels while recovering from typhoid fever in the hospital. It is a tale that all readers will love, and I highly recommend it for anyone's shelves.
QUOTES
She says that if Dad's job lasts we'll get proper cups and maybe saucers and some day, with the help of God and His Blessed Mother, we'll have sheets on the bed and if we save a long time a blanket or two instead of those old coats which people must have left behind during the Great Famine.
That dog is a right Hindu, so she is, and that's where I found her mother wandering around Bangalore. If ever you're getting a dog, Francis, make sure it's a Buddhist. Good-natured dogs, the Buddhists. Never, never get a Mahommedan. They'll eat you sleeping. Never a Catholic dog. They'll eat you every day including Fridays.
Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
The style was different ... stream of consciousness. Quite realistic. Not enjoyable but important.
Although I enjoyed the book, I found it quite depressing. Sandy said she liked it because it spoke of resilience.
My favorite part was the chapter on his first confession. "Bless me, father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession." He then went to communion and later that day threw up in his grandmother's backyard. She had a fit and made him return to confession. He said, "Bless me, faher, for I have sinned. It has been 24 hours since my last confession." He then told the priest he threw up God in his grandmother's backyard The priest said that was okay, just rinse it with water. He returned home and told his grandmother. She said, "Holy water or regular water." He returned to the confessional, "It has been five minutes since my last confession."
I wasn't sure about this book at first. It's very, very raw. McCourt's style is stream-of-consciousness; he eschews quotation marks, tones down his punctuation and sticks mostly to the present tense. The narrative feels like it came
Slowly but surely, the book grew on me. I found myself becoming absorbed. I was eager to read onwards. The content is more than a little depressing, but McCourt tells his story with enough warmth and humor that I never felt overwhelmed by his family's difficulties.
I doubt I'll ever read this again, but I'm glad I read it once. It was a very slow read, but definitely a worthwhile one.