What a beautiful book. You will never look at your home's second story the same way again after reading of the flooding incident and how the family retreated to the upper story. I add this to the long line of reasons for wishing my Grandmother were still around so that I could ask about stories of our family's past in Cork. Read. This. Book.

This memoir is both beautifully written but also incredibly depressing. I have yet to watch the film based on this book, but many of the anecdotes will be hard to forget.

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!

Одна из лучших книг в моей жизни. Буду перечитывать и всем советовать. Это как «отверженные», «замок из стекла» и «бесконечные дни» только ещё лучше!

Ревью напишу попозже.

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.

Is this one of the all-time great memoirs?

‘Tis.

--

For a while now, I’ve been trying to teach my students about personal writing, about finding a narrative. So, I had the idea of reading first-person stories and memoirs as a way of teaching “voice-finding.” I’d went and looked up the best memoirs on some random website, and this came up every time. For some reason, I thought I’d read it, but within a chapter or two, I realized I hadn’t.

It’s an awful tale, a story of a dreadful childhood. The man is born at the very onset of the Depression, made worse by his father’s terrible drinking habits. They return to Ireland, his parents’ homeland, for some form of security, but find none of it. Death and illness surround Frankie, such that it’s a near miracle for him to be alive. My heart broke multiple times.

And yes: it’s a wonderful, down-to-earth, clear voice. I can imagine him writing this, going on and on within one sentence, just allowing the words to flow. Long sentences can drive me crazy, especially when the grammar goes out the window. But for some reason I was really drawn. He tells the tale in such a heartfelt and kind way, just the way an adolescent might think. Tragic and sad at times, but genuine and wise.

There’s one section involving Confession that made me laugh out loud. In fact, it was kind of like Charlie Brown: the adults seemed to speak a different language. The priests, teachers, aunts and uncles were just hilarious (maybe not in the case of Laman, of course), seemingly at odds with everything Frank was trying to do.

But the whole thing reminded me that I’ve been derelict in my duty to my ancestors. It’s been on my bucket list to see where my grandmother grew up, and for whatever reason I’ve never done it. I have family there, too: distant family, sure, but I’d like to meet them. I’ve heard such wonderful things from everyone who’s visited, such great hospitality, wonderful views, amazing history. Shame on me for not doing it sooner. One day, I promise.

A must-read for anyone interested in memoirs. I might take a break before 'Tis but I’ll get to it in 2023.

There once was a lad reared in Limerick,
Quite literally without a bone to pick.
His da used scant earnings
To slake liquid yearnings;
In American parlance – a dick.

To get past a father who drank
In a place that was dismal and dank,
He wrote not in rhymes,
But of those shite times
A memoir that filled up his bank.

اجاق سرد آنجلا یک آتوبیوگرافی زیبا بود.

زیباترین و غم انگیزترین بیوگرافی که تاحالا میتونستم خونده باشم
ابتدای کتاب از زبان یه پسر خردسال شروع میشه و همینطور که کتاب جلوتر میشه این پسر بچه ی توی کتاب هم بزرگ تر و پخته تر میشه واین پختگی توی متن کتاب و طریقه ی صحبت این پسر حس میشه.
فرانک مک‌کورت توی این کتاب درباره ی همه چیز صحبت میکنه. از قبل از اینکه به دنیا بیاد شروع میکنه به توضیح دادن که چجوری پدر و مادرش باهم اشنا شدن و چه کسایی باعث شدن که مادرش و پدرش باهم ازدواج کنند. فرانک درباره ی پدرش میگه که چطور تمام چند دلار پولی که درمیاورد رو خرج الکل میکنه و اون و مادرش و برادراش همیشه گشنه‌ن. فرانک درباره ی برگشتنشون از امریکا به ایرلند توضیح میده درحالی که وقتی خودش بزرگ میشه آرزوش بازگشت دوباره به امریکاست.
فرانک و مادرش و برادرهاش زندگی سختی رو داشتند. هم توی امریکا و هم توی ایرلند. فرانک توی ایرلندی زندگی میکنه که از دست انگلستان آزاد شده ولی وقتی جنگ میشه بخاطره چندقرون پول همه ی ایرلندی ها به انگلیس میرند. چون توی ایرلند چیزی نیست که بخواد این مردم رو نجات بده. تنها چیزی که توی ایرلند موج میزد مذهب بود، اینکه تو باید حواست باشه که توی مراشم عشاء ربانی تمیز باشی و لباس های تمیز بپوشی (درحالی که چندین ماه هست جز لباس هایی که تنت بوده لباس دیگه ای نداشتی)، حواست باشه جسم خدا به دندونت گرفته نشه مگرنه گناه کردی، و هیچوقت یادت نره که باید جانت رو برای ایمانت فدا کنی.

در یک قسمتی از کتاب فرانک میگه:
"معلم می‌گوید مرگ در راه ایمان افتخار بزرگی است و پدر می‌گوید مرگ برای ایرلند افتخار بزرگی است و من مانده ام که آیا اصولا کسی می‌خواهد ما زنده بمانیم؟ "

توی این کتاب همه نقش دارن و زندگی همه تعریف میشه از پدر و مادر فرانک و خاطراتشون تا پیرمرد پولداری که به فرانک پول میداد تا براش قصه بخونه، حتی شیموس که توی بیمارستان کار می‌کرد.

A ver se faço vídeo de opinião, porque esta leitura merece-o!

Aqui está o vídeo prometido:
https://youtu.be/yHXls0FsGtI

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.

Mărturisesc că am citit-o aproape până la final ca pe un roman, deși știam că sunt memorii, dar mi s-a părut că e ficționalizat destul de mult. A fost doar intuiția mea. Apoi am citit că a existat o controversă destul de puternică după ce a câștigat Pulitzerul, oameni menționați în carte au spus că a exagerat sărăcia familiei și a orașului Limerick.
Probabil nu vom ști niciodată cât e patriotism local al iralndezilor care susțin că orașul lor nu a fost niciodatâ atât de obscen de sărac și cât a plusat McCourt ca să impresioneze. Dar să impresioneze a reușit, cel puțin în cazul meu.

Heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time.