This is one of the most depressing and heartbreaking true-life novels I've ever read so be forewarned, this Pulitzer Prize winner is pretty tough to take.

In the beginning, Francis (Frank) McCourt's family story starts out so desperate, you think it can't get any worse, BUT....IT....DOES!

Frankie had a very short and dreadful childhood in Limerick, Ireland. Even at age four with only the clothes (rags) on his back, he had adult responsibilities caring for his twin baby brothers, changing and washing dirty diapers by hand (with no coal to heat the water), taking them to the park (ordered to keep them away until dark) and trying desperately to entertain them so they will stop crying.......of starvation! With no sheets or blankets on the lice and flea-ridden mattress plus the sewage that often overflowed into the kitchen, it is a wonder that any of Angela's six? (I lost count) children survived. (some sadly did not) I think if I would have had to read one more episode about daddy picking up his dole money at the Labor Exchange on Friday and proceeding to drink it ALL away AGAIN I truly would have thrown this book across the room!!! (and I dearly love my books), but thankfully this non-fiction nightmare came to an end...at least for me.

Frank McCourt lived until the age of 78 and does have a sequel to this novel, "TIS", that continues his life story in America for those interested. (The significance of the title "Angela's Ashes" was not what I thought it would be)

izvrstan, pulitzerom ovjenčan memoarski roman o odrastanju u irskom gradu limericku, između 1930. i 1949. frank mccourt, s vremenskim odmakom od 60 godina, prisjeća se odrastanja u krajnjoj bijedi, gladi i siromaštvu; rođen u najnižem sloju irskog društva, u vrijeme nakon velike gladi, kao sin oca koji je uglavnom besposlen, a kada i nađe posao, svaki petak zapije plaću, a majka je vječno trudna i pokušava živu djecu prehraniti, dok paralelno mrtvu sahranjuje.

prepušten sam sebi i ulici, s oblinom dozom humora (koji, slijedom, često bude i crni), bez okrivljavanja, bez suda, bez zgražanja i bez drame, vodi te kroz svojih prvih 19 godina života. tekst je toliko jasan, realan i pun života da prolaziš kroz te stranice s opipljivim, posve jasnim scenama grada, ljudi, njihovih bijednih, vlažnih i ušljivih domova, proživljavaš njihove sušice i tifuse, njihov sram, jad i očaj, njihova razočarenja i uzaludne nade.
paralelno s čitanjem, tražila sam stare fotografije limericka i uličnog života: ono što sam našla, posve odgovara slici koju sam stvorila čitajući knjigu.

nastavak, "irac u new yorku", slijedi čim prije.

Я наверное неделю теперь не смогу ничего читать

I ended up really enjoying this book, in spite of my earlier frustrations with it.

To say this book is depressing is one of the grossest understatements I've made in the past year. The book is narrated by the very young Frank McCourt and follows a child's stream of consciousness to describe the things he sees but doesn't always understand. As he gets older, the narration implies less and becomes more stark as Frankie develops the ability to see and understand what is happening in his family.

There is no punctuation used to annotate spoken words from written prose and it took awhile for me to accustom myself to the format. But I found that over time, it became easier to follow and the writing became quite lyrical. I can't help but think this would make a fantastic audiobook if read in an Irish accent.

I have the sequel to this book on my shelf but I can't say as I'm looking forward to rushing out and reading it. The alcoholic father and the dying babies and the dirty, starving children and the helpless mother were all a bit much for me to stomach in one go. I need a long break, so perhaps someday.

I just love it when I come across a book as beautiful and extraordinary as this one. As I had already watched the film of "Angela's Ashes" I knew this was going to be somewhat bleak, but I had no idea just what an amazing book this would turn out to be.

Frank McCourt describes a childhood that is ridden with poverty. He made me cry, he made me angry, he made me happy and he even made me laugh. The book is harrowing, but the humour in this book is uplifting, and one cannot help but smile. My heart went out to the McCourt family, and the sorrows they had to endure.

I must admit, it was tremendously difficult to read about Frank's father, who was an alcoholic, that regularly spent every penny he had in pubs, instead of bringing home the wages to feed his (ever growing) family. It made me sigh in utter dismay, and I cannot quite get my head around an adult, who would rather put his needs first, instead of feeding his starving family.

Frank McCourt is entirely masterful with this words, and he had me hooked from the first page. I'm only sad that that the book ended, and rather unexpectedly at that.

In every lane there’s someone not talking to someone or everyone not talking to someone or someone not talking to everyone. You can always tell when people are not talking by the way they pass each other. The women hoist their noses, tighten their mouths and turn their faces away. (PG 133)

Okay… there are some seriously depressing moments and disgusting memories but this guy is (was) hilarious. He is (was) a witty wizard. I appreciate his honesty and the style of writing. I don’t know what it is about these Irish writers with their self-deprecating selves but the English have nothing on these people in style and witticism. (No offense just being honest)

One of the best memoirs I’ve read, in my teeny weeny life. Gave me goosebumps, laughter, turned my stomach and made me sad. This had it all.

This is one I never wanted to end. How effed up people lived/live like this.

Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

This book is kind of like that bit in A Chorus Line where the director is making everyone tell him about their childhoods and the one guy goes, "Nobody wants to admit they had a happy childhood." There are two instances where this statement is extremely true: show business, and memoir writing.

Angela's Ashes (which is apparently the first in a series?) chronicles the childhood and adolescence of Frank McCourt, born into a poor Irish family with no money but a surplus of babies. His mother, Angela, does the best she can to prevent her children from starving to death on a daily basis; meanwhile the patriarch of the family is a man who, as Jack Donaghy might say, "belongs in the Smiling Irish Bastard hall of fame." Things aren't good, is what I'm saying. The kids dress in filthy rags, they have to collect coal on the side of the road to heat their depressing shack of a house, the majority of the kids die of some horrible disease, the father insists on drinking every goddamn penny he earns, and Frank just wants to drop out of school so he can get a job and maybe afford a meal every few weeks. Bleak does not begin to cover it.

(giant sidebar: did anyone else watch Enlisted? Of course no one did, that's why it got cancelled after one season even thought it was fantastic. Anyway, there's a bit where one of the characters is super depressed so he decides to read Angela's Ashes, to further wallow in misery, and he tells another character, "I'm at the part where he gives a raisin to the boy with no shoes." I watched that part and thought, well obviously the writers made that up, that's just a spot-on parody of the stuff that goes on in miserable memoirs like that. But then I read the book a few weeks later and guys, that scene totally happens. That's the level Frank McCourt is operating at.)

Look, I'm not saying Frank McCourt had to put a happy face on his horrible, horrible childhood just to make me less uncomfortable. His memoir is searing and honest, but it is also unrelenting in its bleakness. There are small flashes of happiness here and there, but the book was so overwhelming sad that every time something good happened to the family in this story, my first thought was, "Well, this can't last." Which, actually, is a very Irish-Catholic reaction to have, so congratulations to me for making my ancestors proud.

The writing is very good, at least, so all the misery is very well-described and the characters are subtle and well-drawn. The book certainly deserved the Pulitzer it won, although if we're being really honest with ourselves the prize was probably awarded not for the great writing or characters but because the people at the Pulitzer awards get giant literary boners for misery porn like this.

Realistically, I should give this four stars, because I liked the book, but I'm docking a point because of the ending. Without giving anything away, it's just too abrupt. Nothing gets resolved, there's no sense of a conclusion, it's just like McCourt got tired of the book and said, "Well, let's just stop here" and then it ends. It was not satisfying, and not worth all the misery I went through to get to the end.

“Ripensando alla mia infanzia, mi chiedo come sono riuscito a sopravvivere. Naturalmente è stata un’infanzia infelice, sennò non ci sarebbe gusto. Ma un’infanzia infelice irlandese è peggio di un’infanzia infelice qualunque, e un’infanzia infelice irlandese e cattolica è peggio ancora.” Quello che più colpisce di “Le ceneri di Angela” è la riuscitissima compenetrazione dell’elemento comico in quello tragico. Nel romanzo di McCourt, infatti, morti, disgrazie e disavventure varie si susseguono con implacabile sistematicità, senza peraltro che venga mai meno il tono fondamentalmente umoristico della narrazione. Non si ha una deformazione grottesca della sofferenza; l’effetto è ottenuto soprattutto grazie alla prospettiva con cui è raccontata la storia, che è quella di un bambino per il quale, ad esempio, il dolore per la morte di una sorella è in qualche modo risarcito dai dolci che può avere l’occasione di mangiare dopo il funerale. Purtroppo la storia perde il suo mordente al termine dell’infanzia del protagonista e con la quasi contemporanea scomparsa di un personaggio particolarmente significativo e ben riuscito. Ad ogni modo, è una lettura che consiglio, vi farà guardare un semplice tozzo di pane con occhi diversi !

One of the best books of the 1990s-this beautifully written memoir tells of the suffering of a poverty stricken childhood in Ireland of the 1930s and 40s-written in such a way that it captures the sadness of the suffering of the family, and yet retains a seismic wit that will make you cry and laugh in turn.

Always written from the point of view of the child and teenager Frankie, at the age he is at the time, never from the perspective of an older man looking back, this is a book you wont want to put down and will stay with you forever.
This book takes you from the eraluest memories of the auhtor as a toddler to the angst and burgeoning sexuality of his teens.

Frank is the son of a alcoholic father who squanders the few wages he ever gets on drink (while making his children swear to die for Ireland), and a mother who struggles to keep the family together. It begins with his life until he is four in New York during the Great Depression, and then the family's return to the greater depression of their homeland, Ireland, where they live on a tiny government dole, and the charity of begrudging relatives.

what makes this memoir so compelling is how the author juggles the different emotions, always with a ready wit, which makes this book a classic, and yet always at the same time displaying to pathos and misery of the Ireland of this era.

McCourt describes the loss of his baby sisters with heart wrenching realism. He has three more brothers, the more charming and easy going Malachy, the king hearted Michael who brings home beggars and stray dogs to the family's humble abode, and the youngest Alphie.

Always pervasive is the grinding poverty, the oppressive and guilt-inducing all pervading presence of the Catholic church and education system ,and the fierce patriotism and resentment at Realm of the time of the 800 years of English domination and cruelty.

But what always shines through is the refusal to forget the humour and hope, the appreciation of small things and nature, through such crushing circumstances, and always the hope. The memoir closes with the realization of Frank's dream and goal to emigrate back to the America of his birth. Ultimately it is a book of the life of life, and refusal to ever be sunk by circumstances-what makes it more inspiring is a true life story of the authors' childhood.

Picked this memoire to experience some more foreign countries through literature. Good choice. What could have easily been another misery porn (immense poverty, hunger, never-ending unwanted pregnancies, drunkenness, strict religion, deaths of TB and pneumonia on every other page) became something more because of the author's remarkable voice, filled with innocence, humor and almost unwavering optimism of childhood. Amazing that McCourt managed to preserve this voice well into his 60s.

خیلی دوستش داشتم

This is the second time reading this book. The first time I read this book I was a university student. It was probably summer and I was probably breezing through a large reading list of my own creation. I remember liking the book...but I also remember it killed a little bit of the joy of my summer. A book about poverty and hunger has a way of doing that.

Now, having read the book a second time as a slightly grayer adult, I can say that I like the book, but don't love it. Like other books of hardscrabble living -- think Faulkner or Steinbeck -- this book gives you an appreciation for just how good things are when you have a full belly and aren't constantly on the move looking for work. The book reminds you that there are people in the world that are constantly on the move and whose greatest concern is where they will get their next meal. A book that brings out the humanity of this situation is a gift. No one was better at this than Steinbeck in my opinion.

McCourt's memoir is heartbreaking at times, but there is also a sense of detachment in the memoir. A sense that the author himself had become a bit numb to the poverty and hunger he witnessed. To be sure, this is better than the sin of melodrama -- where things are overdramatized with overly elaborate prose. But still, I think there is a balance to be had between sparsity and the poetry of prose.

If you're a fan of sparse prose, something like this might strike you as especially poetic.

"Frost is already whitening the fresh earth on the grave and I think of Theresa cold in the coffin, the red hair, the green eyes. I can't understand the feeling going through me but I know that with all the people who died in my family and all the people who died in the lanes around me and all the people who left I never had a pain like this in my heart and I hope I never will again."

For me, though, I want to feel something more for Theresa, and I think there is more in Frankie McCourt's heart than an inability to understand and feel. Something like this: "In the frost whitened ground there is a girl I only barely knew and the things I will never know about her and all the other people who sit hungry in the lanes waiting to die, wasting away in piles of rags, their own filth, and the death of the river Shannon. The enormity of death, poverty, filth, and senselessness fills me with something...something hard, mean, and bitter. I want to lash out at some villain in the shadows, a movie villain twirling his mustache...but then I think of Theresa in the cold ground and all the things I'll never know about her and my knees buckle. I fall...and people in the lane are still hungry...and tomorrow someone else will die. The frost will fall. The ground will whiten. And there will be nothing I can do."

I don't know why I wanted to re-write that part. Perhaps it is just my way of getting to know Frank McCourt better...I want to understand...and to feel...

There are also moments of great levity where you see the innocence of youth. Again, though, there seems to be a kind of journalist's detachment of sparsity to the writing. I wouldn't be surprised if the author was a fan of Hemingway. I was a big fan too, once.

Until we meet again Frankie.