If you are afraid of your emotions, whether the depth or variety of them, don't read this book. If you can allow yourself to explore them fully by being led through an incredible life's early journey and experiencing the range of feeling available to humanity, you will love this book.

“You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”

This book comes highly recommended by everyone I've met and know. Also, it seems like I might have been the last person to read this book but I am happy I did.

In Angela'a Ashes Frank McCourt paints us a vivid picture of his early life, from the point of leaving America and settling in Limerick. In this memoir we learn about life in Ireland during the depression and what trails the McCourt family faced.

Usually I would devour and ABSOLUTELY love a book like this but... I just could not get into this book. I spent two weeks trying to finish it. Every time I picked it up I got depressed all over again. This book reads like a series of very unfortunate even that just wont quit. My heart broke for Angela and at times I wanted to physically fight her husband.

A hard read.

P.S. In the case of this rating, its mostly about me and not the book. I might revisit it later in life.

Dei servizi igenici.

Ma ci pensate a quanto siamo fortunati ad avere l' acqua corrente che ci permette di sbarazzarci della sporcizia premendo un semplice pulsante?
Ogni volta che caracollavo verso il bagno con il libro in mano (perchè non mentiamoci conoscete un posto più intellettualmente stimolante del bagno? A partire dalla tazza del wc fino ad arrivare alla doccia o alla vasca da bagno) mi veniva in mente il povero Frank che si trascinava su e giù il vaso da notte di Laman Griffin per potersi garantire il diritto di avere un tetto sopra la testa e a quanto sia costato al poveretto dopo tutte le umiliazioni che stava già subendo.

Sostanzialmente il declino delle condizioni della famiglia di Frank in questo romanzo è strettamente collegato al grado di degenerazione dei servizi igenici.
Partiamo dall' america dove abbiamo, sì ,servizi comuni per tutto il pianerottolo (che le condizioni comunque non sono mai state rosee), però con l' acqua corrente ; fino ad arrivare in Irlanda con il punto dove si svuotano i vasi da notte (perchè acqua corrente la si può solo sognare) praticamente davanti casa.
Capirete un po quel sottile senso di colpa che mi attanagliava quando potevo tranquillamente tirare lo sciacquone e sparire quando il poveretto era costretto a sopportare olezzi nauseabondi.

Finito di vagheggiare sui servizi igenici posso solo dire che questo libro è bellissimo. Del resto ,a parte poche eccezioni, quand'è che un premio Pulitzer non lo è?
Frank McCourt è in grado di farsi amare e di suscitare grande simpatia, facendoci vedere che anche se non se l'è vista mica bella, anche sulle cose più tragiche bisogna essere in grado di spendere un sorriso.
Curiosa come una bertuccia ,come è il mio solito, sono andata a curiosare su Youtube e ho trovato una bella intervista in cui questo signore parla della sua infanzia leggendone appunto proprio da questo libro e parlandone in una maniera che me lo ha reso ancora più simpatico:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTyPRn...

Non vedo l' ora di leggere gli altri due romanzi della trilogia.

“Dovete studiare e imparare per farvi un’opinione vostra sulla storia e su tutto, se la mente è vuota le opinioni uno non se le può fare. Riempitevi la mente, riempitevi la mente. La mente è il vostro tesoro e nessuno al mondo può ficcarci il naso. Se uno di voi vincesse la lotteria d’Irlanda e si comprasse una casa in cui servissero i mobili secondo voi ci metterebbe tutta robaccia? La mente è la vostra casa e se la riempite di robaccia sentita e vista al cinema la manderete in malora. Potete anche essere poveri e avere le scarpe rotte, ma la vostra mente sarà sempre un palazzo.”

"I stand on the deck with the Wireless Officer looking at the lights of America twinkling. He says, My God, that was a lovely night, Frank. Isn't this a great country altogether?"

'Tis.

Re-read October 2023, reviewed December.

“Shakespeare is like mashed potatoes. You can barely get enough of him.”
--F.M.


image: young Frank McCourt

“You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”


I first read Angela’s Ashes soon after it was published in 1996. The second time was the audio book, perfectly narrated by the author himself, which we listened to while on a car trip. And now, (October), back to the book one more time. This is a favorite book of mine, and surely its opening pages are among the best of the best. (see end of review). The first person voice throughout this memoir could not possibly be improved upon. Young Frank recounts his miserable Irish Catholic childhood with grace and with wit. A teeter-totter of innocence and worldliness.

How bad was it? Miserable, indeed. But throughout is that sense of humor which helps him survive, as does an abiding love for his family, even for his father whose addiction makes matters far worse, who spends every last coin on drink and leaves his family desperately poor and hungry.

Among the challenges:
One by one, four siblings die.
Frank gets typhoid, then conjunctivitis, spending 3.5 months in the hospital. He nearly goes blind.
Frank and his brother have inadequate clothing, shoes worn to shreds, they sometimes go to school barefoot.
For blankets, all they have are dead relative’s old coats.
No money for candles, much less electricity. No heat.
The house inflicted with fleas, lice, rats.
Inadequate sanitation, just one toilet for all the houses on their lane.
The first floor of their home floods in the rainy season. The roof is a sieve.
So poor they re-steep tea leaves, over and over.
And so poor, of course, that they often –very, very often-- are starving.

Frank dreams of mashed potatoes and butter.

……….
The opener:


My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.
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. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.
Above all -- we were wet.
Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year's Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore; to ease the catarrh you boiled onions in milk blackened with pepper; for the congested passages you made a paste of boiled flour and nettles, wrapped it in a rag, and slapped it, sizzling, on the chest.
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 piss wafting in from the outdoor jakes where many a man puked up his week's wages.
The rain drove us into the church -- our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers and candles.
Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.

I LOVED THIS BOOK

Frances McCourt grows up in NYC and quickly his family gets kicked back to Ireland, back to their family after his mother Angela loses a few babies and his dad can't find a job.

In Limerick, Frank grows up in the top half of their dilapidated home, fondly referred to as Italy. So many heartbreaking moments, his family so poor they didn't have two coins to rub together. I appreciated the bits of humor, my heart broke for how accurate a portrayal of this family was, and how SOMEHOW they managed to find bits of joy to cling to.

For me, this was just too long and too meandering. I cannot fault this story or this author's experience since it is his to tell, I just found myself outside of the story at times.

Set during the Great Depression in the 1930's-40's, where Frank lived in New York with his parents (Angela and Malachy) and four younger siblings: Malachy, Oliver, Eugene and Margret, who died shortly after her birth. The family was struggling to survive and ended up having to move back to Ireland. I boo-hooed through the whole book. This man can sure write a story!

In Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt paints a picture of a childhood mired in poverty. He manages to be humorous and heartbreaking, and hopeless and triumphant all at once. I laughed, I cried, I felt dearly for the disadvantaged McCourt family that struggled against all odds.

The memoir borrows heavily from the art of realism -- as tales of impoverished childhoods usually are. McCourt was born in depression era Brooklyn to an alcoholic father who spent all his wages at the bar, and a mother disgraced and desperate to feed her starving children. Here, we have a glimpse at the life of an Irish family living in a ratty (but ethnically diverse) tenement building. The children were often left their own devices, while the adults struggled with adult problems -- keeping a home, putting food on the table, etc. Loss is a prevalent and recurring theme in the book. Frankie's siblings, as young as several months, were victims of death many times.

Things don't improve when they move back to Ireland to start over. Their North-Irish and alcoholic of a father couldn't find work, drank all the charity money they managed to get, and eventually abandoned his family for good. Meanwhile, the rest of the family must overcompensate by stealing, begging, and applying for public assistance -- the shame of which deeply affect each member of the family. Additionally, Frankie, a devout Catholic, must reconcile his church values and practices with stealing to feed his family, his sexual awakening, and the continuing deaths of his family and acquaintances.

All in all, fantastic depression-era slice-of-life of a poor Irish family. McCourt is soulful and has a way with weaving tales and building characters. He makes you laugh and cry with the family, and keeps you rooting for their survival. I was very engaged and was sorry it had to end (a bit too abruptly too, I must say.) Five stars.

I grew up hearing about how my Irish maternal grandfather had gone out one day to buy a pack of cigarettes one night and never returned home to his family. While they were not exactly in the economic level of poverty of the Frank McCourt's family, it still brought to life the mentality of that time - especially of the men who were alcoholics. It was a hard book to read, depressing on a different level when told from the perspective of a child. That still doesn't take away from my feeling that it was a good book.

What, did NO one find this book funny except me??? I must be really perverse.
Although the account of Frank's bad eyes was almost physically painful to read, the rest of the story didn't seem too odd or sad or overdone to me. My dad's family were immigrants; his father died young of cirrhosis of the liver, leaving my grandmother to raise her six living children (of a total of 13) on a cleaning woman's pay. So? Life was hard. They weren't Irish and they lived in New York, but when you hear that your dad occasionally trapped pigeons and roasted them to eat, you develop a certain, er, resistance to tales of woe. They worked hard and did the best they could. And in between, life could be really, really funny. That's how I saw this book. After reading some of the reviews here, I'm beginning to think I read a different book. Or that I'm completely odd, which is much more likely.

It's been ten years since I've read this book. Like everyone else I was floored by it when it first came out. But time and age have made me wiser.

I don't think it's stood the test of time and the more I think of it... my grandmother is right. It's a one-sided, depressing view of life in Ireland.

"Woah is me..." is the book in a nutshell. This book simply has you marinate in negativity. Maybe I've read too much Phillip Roth in the meantime and compared to his characters this book seems too whiny and annoying.

I read masterieces like the Grapes of Wrath or As I Lay Dying and they still ring true. This? Not so much.

You want to know about Ireland:

read the series of books starting with The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan.

"In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry (our ancestors) and gathering a group of supporters (wouldn't be suprised if one of them fought...) But before long the insurgency collapsed in the face of a brutal English counterattack.

Very few books succeed in registering the sudden terrible impact of historical events; Thomas Flanagan's is one. Subtly conceived, masterfully paced, with a wide and memorable cast of characters, The Year of the French brings to life peasants and landlords, Protestants and Catholics, along with old and abiding questions of secular and religious commitments, empire, occupation, and rebellion. It is quite simply a great historical novel."

or James Joyce's The Dubliners or Ulysses...

or Sean O'Casey The Plough & the Stars

or William Inge's Playboy of the Western World