'Tis

The beginning of this book is suppose to be the end of "Angela's Ashes" but he didn't have the guts to explain why he learned to not have a fiddler's fart about anything.

So since the editor made him change it, he must have ended it with "Tis" to reference this book and then ended this book with the reason for the title of his first book being "Angela's Ashes."

I guess we all know that Frank McCourt's life turned out pretty well, being a published prizewinning author and all that. But if we didn't know how his story ends, we would be left with the fact that he was a pretty sorry soul who was forever not saying what he wanted to say and forever following in his father's drunken footsteps. He haplessly falls into situation after situation that are entirely joyless, and looses women and opportunities to the bottle. Angela's Ashes was lovely storytelling artfully accomplished through the eyes of a boy. But 'Tis had nothing that special going for it. 'Tis was made blurry though the "bad eyes" of an alcoholic. 'Twas a disappointment for this McCourt fan.

I read this book two years after I picked it up at a Book Exhibition I walked into in Pondicherry, India. I bought it because, it was the only book that seemed interesting enough and well, who leaves a book exhibition without buying at least ONE book?

Considering the fair warning in the blurb about the memoir being about a young Irish lad sailing into America with rotten teeth and infected eyes, I had prepped myself enough for the self pity, that also came in truckloads. However, there were instances through the book where the author's grip with humour was so splendid that I had to actually put the book down, finish my uncontrollable laughter and then get back to it.

You find yourself living the author's life with him as you read, questioning his decision to marry whom he married (what were you thinking Bro?) and smiling in satisfaction when it ends up a disaster (I told you so!). You laugh with him, cry with him and in my case, he brings back a whole load of memories of Ireland, a country I absolutely loved!

A great read, surely recommended if you enjoy memoirs (I am a little weary of them but this was GOOD.)

Now to try and get my hands on Angela's Ashes.

I enjoyed this sequel to "Angela's Ashes", because of Frank McCourt's ability to recollect dialogue, and his way of writing the words so well that you can just HEAR the Irish accent while you read.

It is so amazing and inspiring to see where Frank comes from, the slums of Ireland, with his essentially single mother to college, eventually graduate school, & later a teacher in New York City. It's a long road out of the slums & out of his own head of fears, limitations, & low self esteem to the place where he is able to make something of himself..

One thing about Frank as an author is that he tells the truth, even if it's ugly and shows his own flaws. I struggled with him drinking too much & repeatedly visiting the Irish pubs, especially after growing up WITHOUT his alcoholic father who couldn't prioritize his wife & children ahead of his addiction for drink & abandoned them all to poverty & a life of misery. It was hard to read about Frank stopping for a beer after school, & then one beer turns into a nine hour binge, and then oh well what's one more when the wife is already going to be pissed, so what's the use... I couldn't help but think Frank was possibly self sabotaging his life & relationships. While I appreciate honesty, I'll offer my own: I am disappointed with Frank for this drinking, & if it weren't for that, I would have easily given the book 4 stars.

What I love about Mr McCourt is that he never fails to make me laugh out loud, even in the midst of the grimmest material. He is funny! I laughed a lot.

I also have a great respect for the language, cultural, and financial struggles that immigrants have when they first come to this country.

My brother was the one who told me to read Frank McCourt’s 1996 Pulitzer-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes. It was one of the books that made me who am I today: a voracious reader.

It took me 12 years before reading its 1999 sequel, ’Tis (short for “It is”). Reason: I wanted to let the cute and innocent boy Frank and his brothers Malachy, Michael and Alphie to stay as long as possible in my mind. I did not want them to grow up. I wanted to hold on to the image of those boys running and walking around the impoverished and dirty street of Limerick searching for coal and food. Angela’s Ashes struck me that much that I wanted the book’s memories to stay so I don’t want to imagine that those boys have grown up into men. In fact, when Frank McCourt (1930-2009) died two years ago (July 19, 2009), I did not want to hear about it. I neither read the article on the paper nor looked him up at the website.

So both succeeding memoirs, ’Tis and Teacher Man (2005) had to wait. When I joined Goodreads in 2009, I added these books. One of my first friends Charles was reading these and he liked ’Tis so much that he also (same as his rating for Angela's)gave it a 5-star rating. I promised him that I would read this too but I still could not let go of Angela’s Ashes memories. My Peter Pan-like behavior still won over my promise. Then Charles had a hiatus in GR and I had another reason to bury these books at the bottom of my tbr heap of books.

Last month, Charles suddenly popped up in GR after two years of absence. Worse, he also said that he would attend our group’s meet up so we will see each other face-to-face. How will I explain to him that I have not yet read ’Tis? So, I looked for this book. No need to romanticize the image of the McCourt boys. Wake up, K.D. and face the reality. People grow up, age and die. These are facts of life. Even if reading provides us the opportunity to create fictional worlds in our minds, facts are facts and Frank McCourt has long been dead.

So, I picked up ’Tis and started reading. Oh I hated the first part. What? The boy Frank is now a young man at 19 years old and left Ireland on MS Irish Oak going to New York? I struggled accepting the truth and could not relate to his grown up experiences: almost becoming a sexual prey by a Catholic priest in a hotel, US Army in Europe as a Corporal, his visit back to Ireland, graduating from NYU despite not finishing high school and his first years as a teacher at McKee Vocational and Technical High School and the prestigious Stuyvesant High School where his secret came out: He is the teacher who never finished high school. The story still retains that old playful and childlike tone that I felt in love with in Angela’s Ashes. McCourt has this uncanny ability of making simple dialogues catchy and witty. His tongue-in-cheek comments about Catholic and sex are just outrageous and can put smile even during gloomy days at home. Gloomy because my daughter had an accident and she is now wearing a shoulder sling, my wife feeling so busy sending and fetching our injured daughter to and from her school, one of the maids is on vacation while the other one is 5-month pregnant with no husband.

However, the second part of the book is awesome. Angela McCourt, the mother pays a visit to her sons in the US: Frank, now a high school teacher, Malachy, a bar owner, Michael, an American soldier and Alphie, living in Manhattan. Then when Angela dies in the US, she is cremated and her ashes are bought back to Ireland and was scattered in some tombs of famous people there. It explains the title of the first book as it reminds me that I had that question before in my mind.

I am glad I finally read this book. Now, I can face Charles and say that I’ve read the book and we can talk about it. And during the discussion, I’ll bear in mind that all these things – the meet ups, the friends we make along the way, my daughter’s injury, my pregnant maid without a husband, etc – all these things will pass. What is important is how we live the present. And as they say, if you should do something, you might as well give it your best. 'Tis your best that you should give life.

n  'Tis.n

Esta lectura dista mucho de lo que suelo leer habitualmente, pero de vez en cuando hay cositas que me llaman la atención y con las que he acertado siempre.
Ésta es la continuación de Las cenizas de Ángela en la que el protagonista nos cuenta desde su visión de niño como es la vida en un callejón de un pueblo de Irlanda. Ahora nos cuenta sus vivencias desde que llega a Nueva York con 19 años. Nos cuenta situaciones que nos parecerían a priori rídiculas u obvias pero que son tan reales como la vida misma. Nadie nos enseña si vivimos en un pueblo pobre como afrontar la gran ciudad o como debemos actuar al bañarnos cuando compartimos un retrete con todas las personas que viven en un callejón.
Si tuviera que definirla con una frase sería: el que la sigue la consigue

Having read Angela's Ashes a few months back, I knew I wanted a continuation of the story, of Frank McCourt’s life and the lives of his family members. Can never get enough of that Misery Lit, I guess. In any case, ’Tis does serve as a continuation, picking up where Angela’s Ashes left off, with Frank’s arrival in New York. Only, this isn’t some cathartic culmination of Frank’s success, but rather the beginning of a new chapter, one that’s going to be long, arduous and fraught with difficulties, challenges and learning curves.

There are several themes Frank explores throughout this American chapter of his life, which I reckon can be divided into several different categories, those of alienation, teaching and Frank’s struggle to reconcile himself to his tough childhood and life in Ireland.

Alienation is everywhere. The pages of this memoir are soaked in it. Frank is constantly being made aware of his Otherness, his differences and his position as an outcast, a Paddy-just-off-the-boat. However, in a city as sprawling and diverse as New York, he is far from the only Other. New York is full of Italians, Greeks, Puerto Ricans, the Irish, Hispanics, Scandinavians, etc. You’d think that in a place that diverse there’d be lots of commingling, camaraderie and a sense of unity among all these different recently-arrived migrants from all over the world, but nah. Just as the Irish keep urging Frank to “stick to his own kind” and “marry one of his own”, so too do the members of all these other ethnicities and religions keep persuading their own.

Those first chapters are hauntingly beautiful, perfectly describing what it’s like to be a newcomer in a different land with all these strange, foreign customs. Even though Frank has an edge over other newcomers, what with having been born in New York, having an American passport and being fluent in English, there are still some unmistakeable culture shocks he must acclimatise himself to. He is constantly looked down upon, marginalised and Other-ed, and suffers from low self-esteem and an inferiority complex due to his poor health, bad teeth and lack of dazzling Hollywood-like beauty.

He is painfully aware of his Otherness, constantly reminded of it, homesick and lonely. He dreams of going to college and being able to earn enough to support himself, fantasises about pretty women and about one day fitting in with all these healthy Americans with dazzling smiles and bright futures. Ashamed of his childhood spent in penury in the slums of Limerick, Frank mostly keeps to himself, as he slowly works his way up to ever better job positions and ever better standard of life.

These chapters made me so glad I don’t live in the 1950s. Even though some things are still the same, I reckon many have improved since then. The casual racism, the ignorance, the abject poverty, the xenophobia, the dehumanisation… We still, to this day, like to compartmentalise people according to these or those criteria, but I feel the divide isn’t as drastic nowadays, that it’s much easier on fresh immigrants than it was back when Frank crossed the Atlantic.

He keeps thinking of life back home, of his family in Ireland, his poor mother Angela whose dreams and hopes turned to ashes in the fireplace, how his irresponsible father ruined them and crippled Frank and his siblings with his drinking, how they all now have to work extra hard to make it in this world and I feel that misery, not as acutely as Frank and thousands of other Franks out there in the world who’ve had to resort to stealing and begging in order to avoid starvation, but I feel that injustice, how bloody unfair it is that the people who were supposed to help you out in life the most actually hindered your progress, so now you have to work twice as hard as the rest so as to keep up and make something of yourself.

There’s a certain envy there on Frank’s part, as he observes his American peers who’ve had it relatively easy in life, especially in comparison. It’s difficult for him to accept that certain people are born into privilege and affection, whereas he suffered such neglect and hardship and this is best reflected in his mixed feelings for his parents, especially his “shiftless loquacious alcoholic father”.

Frank is saved from his miserable job at the Biltmore Hotel by the Cold War. Whereas all the other Americans are made paranoid by the threat of communism, Frank sees in it an opportunity to rise in society and achieve something better. The military, from my perspective at least, offers a miserable life, one of indoctrination, ignorance, blind servitude and bigotry, but Frank nonetheless manages to get something out of it – a chance to become a University student and join all those bright young people who read important books on the subway. There, he meets Alberta, his first serious girlfriend and his eventual wife and the mother of his daughter.

It is clear their relationship is a difficult one from its infancy. We see in it all the red flags of an eventual doomed marriage, not because Frank and Alberta come from different nationalities or religions or backgrounds, but because there is no true communication between the two, no discussion of expectations, long-term goals or personal beliefs that would make them realise whether they’re compatible or not. In any case, theirs is a volatile, off-and-on relationship that stumbles to the altar, it seems, not because they’re perfect for each other, but because societal norms convinced them that’s just the way it’s meant to be if you’ve dated someone for a while and can stomach their existence enough without the desire to strangle them with your bare hands.

Frank’s post-graduation career life likewise proves to be an uphill battle. He’s no longer a Paddy-off-the-boat, but is very much a recent graduate with no experience asked to teach in a vocational high school. His students don’t respect him, fight him every day, make use of delay tactics and show next to no interest in learning anything. Frank’s patience with them is saintly. If I were confronted with a class like this, I’d show up to work each morning with a flamethrower. Through the use of ingenuity and alternative teaching methods the higher-ups do not always approve of, Frank manages to spark his students’ interest and grow himself, as both an educator and a person.

Finally, there’s Frank’s thread back to Ireland, to his childhood, his siblings and his parents. The ghosts of his past, which he refers to as the “dark clouds” in his head, periodically haunt him as he struggles to reconcile the person he is and the person he wants to be with the person he used to be, that emaciated boy wandering the lanes of Limerick, imploring his father to come home from the pub, assisting his mother in finding food and provisions, taking care of his younger siblings. It’s an arduous emotional journey, coming to terms with one’s childhood, one’s parents’ failed parenting strategies, one’s guilt, one’s blame, maturing enough to see one’s parents as real, flawed people who tried, whether successfully or otherwise, to do their best.

Frank’s first return to Ireland is especially touching, though also equally infuriating. He gets to see just how indoctrinated his mother is, how low her bar is set, how little she expects from life. It is a psychological sort of cage, when what you’re used to becomes the new norm, the only norm you recognise because habit and necessity have made you forget you deserve something better. It’s difficult to see the people you love succumb to that cage. It makes you both pity them and attack them for not knowing any better, for accepting what they think they deserve.

Frank’s encounters with his father are equally unsettling. Malachy Sr. is a lost cause, yet his sons continue to extend allowances and justifications in the hopes that he may one day change. That day never arrives. Certain people never change and never grow, regardless of how many opportunities or how much help we give them and that is a hard truth of life right there, one that’s painful and uncomfortable and difficult to internalise, but one that all of us still need to accept.

All in all, ’Tis isn’t quite as gripping or formidable as Angela’s Ashes, but it is still an incredibly potent narrative of a man’s life. I think the aspect where it shines the brightest is in its descriptions of a migrant’s journey and assimilation into a foreign culture. It reminds me quite a bit of Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, another splendid nonfictional account of what it means to be a newcomer. If I’m being honest, there is no part of this memoir that disappoints. It is an excellent piece of prose by all standards. However, it is a given that the majority of the readers will compare it to Angela’s Ashes, perhaps even subconsciously so. Next to it, ’Tis doesn’t shimmer quite as brightly, an unfair comparison perhaps. That still does not make this memoir an inferior work. If you liked Angela’s Ashes, then you’ll surely enjoy its continuation as well and I definitely recommend you check it out.

This is and isn’t a sequel to “Angela’s Ashes” because it’s not really the story of Angela and her struggles to feed her family in New York and Ireland but the continuing story of the author and oldest son, Frank. Having concluded that there’s nothing much for him in Limerick after being rejected for secondary school except a subsistence job for the Post Office, he takes the decision at 19 to move back to New York. So rather than continuing the moving story of his mother, he writes about his adventures and misadventures as he tries to establish himself in the city of his birth. The question is then, does this shift in tone work? Well, no, because it’s a completely different story, and the author is less sympathetic.

There is obviously a lot of humor here in his struggles and having moved around quite a lot myself, I can appreciate the struggle, and in particular since I also took my accent with me everywhere I went. I’m originally from New York so even in California, I ran into problems at times; I won’t even mention the problems of changing countries and languages, let alone dealing with anti-New York or anti-American attitudes. (I should be clear here: The President doesn’t have me on speed-dial to consult with me on foreign policy decisions so complain elsewhere.) In Frank’s case, everyone has an Irish relative and everyone feels the need to comment on his accent to the point that he just prefers to keep his mouth shut. (It happens, believe me.) One of his early jobs is at a hotel, cleaning up in the lobby after rich and privileged university students. He eventually becomes a high school English teacher where he has the thankless job of trying to convince the students that the required reading has meaning and value in their lives. (Lower middle-class students and “The Great Gatsby” were not a good match; I was one of the former and passed on the latter and its brethren, probably because I was force-fed and needed to come around on my own. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Then they handed out “Vanity Fair” …)

Now, we get to some of my hang-ups with the book. Frank spends a lot of time complaining about how he has no money to eat but he always finds funding for late afternoon “liquid refreshment” which stretches into the wee hours; I don’t think that people always bought him all his drinks so it’s clear that he had his priorities and food wasn’t one. In this, he resembles his barfly father except that Frank always sent money back to Ireland for his mother and brothers, unlike his father when his dad went off to Coventry in England and left the family impoverished. A similar situation happens when he’s love-struck by a woman in university and manages to win her against all odds, marries her and they had a daughter. The problem here is that she’s from a different social class, fairly posh, while he’s strictly proletarian. They have friends, there are dinners and parties to attend, and Frank knows he has to arrive but he always meets a friend who invites him for a drink or twelve, time flies but Frank is firmly landed on a barstool while his wife fumes because she’s been stood up once again. Save your tears, Frank, they’re wasted on me. Two of his brothers have also arrived and are habitués of an uptown bar and wonder why he even bothers with her when he can be with them. (Although not mentioned in the book, his second marriage wasn’t much better; it was his third wife who brought out his creative side and encouraged him to write.)

Angela makes a late appearance as her health declines (with a lot of help from Angela) and she brings a lot of badly-needed comic relief at the end, as does his brother, Malachy. (I should mention that Malachy was a famous raconteur when I lived in New York and another brother, Michael, was the “King of Bartenders” when I lived in San Francisco; Frank had the weight of the world – and his family – on his shoulders, it seems.) However, she couldn’t lift this book from the drudgery that preceded it, not for me. It just never really took off but it had a hard act to follow so maybe that’s understandable.