Given my respect for Frank McCourt and his apparent love for his brother, Malachy, I was eager to read this first book of Malachy's. Very disappointing. He never chooses the most direct word when a four or five syllable one will do. Silly and pretentious style! Seemed as if he was trying to coast on Frank's successes.

I had just finished reading Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, so I thought I’d follow it up with his brother Malachy.

A Monk Swimming is nearly 300 pages of drunkenness, debauchery, pretension, lasciviousness, and using ten dollar words where a fifty cent one would suffice. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any moral compunction against reading drunkenness and debauchery. . .providing it is written well. Problem is, this book isn’t particularly well written. Funny at times, it also seems to be tinged with anger and bitterness.

Mr. McCourt has lived a moderately interesting life, yet I found the story of that life to be mostly boring and repetitious. He definitely has a way with words, but a drunken one-night stand is still a drunken one-night stand, no matter the words used to describe it.

The only thing keeping me from giving this memoir one star instead of two, is the last chapter. Instead of trying too hard to be funny, clever, and impressive, those final two pages were real and filled with heart. If only the same could be said of the first 288 pages.

I waited until finishing this book to look up any current personal information about Malachy McCourt. I was a bit shocked to find out he had just passed away just under 2 months ago, in 2024. After reading about his life in the 1950's and 60's, I'm not sure how he made it to old age!

This was a book I both enjoyed (it's funny and crazy at the same time) and hated (he was a drunk and womanizer who could charm anyone and yet seemed unable to realize how much talent he was wasting for nothing).

I'm looking forward to reading how he managed to make it to old age.

"Hastily, I transferred the snow to the burning part of the mattress and extinguished it, I thought, but an hour or so after I went back to sleep, the smoke revisited me. Bounding out of the bed again, I went for a jug of water and sloshed it all over the spifflicated Paterson. The man hardly stirred, but my mission was complete : Fire Out! and back to bed.

Sometime later I was awakened abruptly and rudely by a rough hand shaking and thumping me. When I opened my eyes to see who it was that had the temerity to behave thusly, I almost had the cardiac seizure. I saw a head crowned wit spikes of ice, icily protruding eyebrows and eyelashes, icicled dripping from the nose. In a very high, indignant voice, the arctic apparition informed me that he was nearly frozen to death. Never in his life had he been subjected to such a horrible place, and he was leaving, and there was no point in trying to stop him."

"In Zurich… Everything was neat and symmetrical and orderly, and not a thing in sight to disturb the color scheme. Flowers, shrubs, and plants all clipped and leaning in unison to the direction of the unseen hand. There were people washing and hosing pavements, cleaning windows, polishing bells, painting walls, and generally doing violence to the natural orders of things. A weed poking its cheery little head up through a crack in a footpath would be cause for mobilization of the Swiss Army and their knives."

This book is the memoirs of Malachy McCourt, who I’d never heard of before I read this book. His brother is the author of Anglela’s Ashes, which I have not read.

A lot of this book was funny, really really funny. But then the rest was just his sad and slightly pathetic existence of drinking and making an ass of himself. It was the drunken tales of an alcoholic. The end was him screaming at his Father for being a drunk that abandoned his family, yet really, it was the same thing he had done. And that was it.

It never went on to say if he became a good father - you know, one that didn’t leave the country for months on end, and didn’t spend every penny he had on the sauce, or ever got his shit together.

So beside some of the funny scenes, the beginning romanticized alcoholism, and the end was incomplete. Maybe that's because it was a memoir and he wasn't dead. Who knows.

This is an awful book, just barely readable. The writing is sketchy and the author is so full of himself and his past of drinking, womanizing and bartending. Don't bother.

This book is really hard to rate, because on the one hand, there's the frequently hilarious exploits of a charming drunk, then on the other hand, there's the destruction of self and others that goes with it, and the fact that the book at least pretends to autobiography makes things a lot less funny when you realise that yes, he did abandon wife and children to go drinking and having fun.

I'll credit the author with at least superficial honesty, and from looking up some facts on his life, he does seem to have turned things around at a later date, but within this book, no redemption is to be found.

No, he's not Frank, he's Malachy, let him be Malachy.
Early on in Angela's Ashes, after leaving NYC, just off the boat in Ireland, at age 3, Malachy saw cows and sheep for the first time. Everything he saw was new and he was full of questions and was driving his dad crazy for answers.
I was that kid. Following my dad around, constantly asking him questions until his answer was finally, "So you can ask me questions." I remember thinking that my dad was the strongest man in the world and that I always felt safe with him. My dad wasn't perfect, but I loved him.
Malachy looks back over his life and he does remember some special moments with his dad, it wasn't all bad.
But how much has he followed in his footsteps? Alcohol consumption, bar fights, broken marriage, separated from his children. How he survived the things he wrote about in this book is a mystery to me.
Now for his second memoir to see how he got his act together.

Malachy McCourt was a younger brother of the well-known memoir writer Frank McCourt who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book "Angela's Ashes". It doesn't mean Malachy was riding Frank's coat tails. He did initially follow his older brother to the U.S. but that seemed to be the only they shared, If there ever was a stereotypical Irishman Malachy who seemed to drink and fight his way through life. He managed to find his way to being a part part bar owner and even manged to appear on television as a local character while living in New York City. Played on an Irish rugby team and managed to encounter future senator Ted Kennedy at Harvard. He also allegedly encountered members of the royal family too. After that he found a way to supplement his income by smuggling gold bars from Europe to India. After all that he managed somehow to get married and have a baby.

Much of the book is lighthearted and will make you laugh at times. He saves his most serious moments for when for his parents, especially in some anger towards his father who spent most of his time drinking and was in out out of jail leaving Malachy's mother , Angela, raise a family in poverty alone. After Angela, with the help of Frank and Malaky emigrates to the U.S. the father begs, pleads and cajoles his family to bring him over too. Frank and Malaky are skeptical but bow to their mother's wishes to bring him over and give him a chance. It turned out he hadn't changed and was still the same unrepentant alcoholic whom the boys wanted nothing to do with.

Overall the book is an entertaining trip with Malaky who is witty, boisterous and adventuresome. It has it's touching moments but is not as heavy as his brother's more famous memoir. His older brother Frank seemed to be the more intellectual and serious type verses the more out-going and adventurous Malaky. Enjoy.

I got this book as a gift years ago and finally decided to get it off my "to read" shelf. I had never heard of Malachy McCourt before, so I only knew it as a memoir about an impoverished Irish immigrant who moves to New York and has some success. That's a fine subject for a memoir, unfortunately Malachy McCourt is a huge asshole.

Malachy is a good storyteller. However, most of his tales involve getting drunk and awful behavior. Constantly cheating on his wife, abandoning his kids, getting in drunken fights, cheating people out of money, and general boorish behavior. There is a lot of name dropping, but I haven't heard of 95% of the people. I sense there is some embellishment of the stories, but who knows...

At one point Malachy claims he has low self-esteem, which is a laughable contradiction to his egotistical behavior. He's mad at his dad for being a drunk who runs away, but doesn't seem to understand the irony of his identical behavior. I was somewhat hoping we'd get a redemption at the end where he realizes the error of his ways. That never really seems to happen though. I'll credit Malachy for not trying to hide what a horrible person he was.

This is a funny, even hilarious book, with amazing anecdotes told succinctly and with surprising language. It's witty, imaginative, almost poetic at times. It's the tale of a life that's extraordinary and a self-made man who entertained dozens in-person and thousands in theaters and on TV. If you ever met Malachy McCourt, you'd probably never forget the experience.

And yet, I can't stand the guy. He's loud, drunk, arrogant, obnoxious. He's violent. He cheats on his wife, ignores his kids, hates his father (with good reason). He's always checking out the women and bragging about getting laid, even if it's with teenage prostitutes in India. (How that isn't sad and pathetic and basically criminal doesn't seem to occur to him.) He's a jerk who I'd go as far away from as possible.

The book leaves a bad taste in your mouth, like the mornings he describes when he's staggered back to whatever couch he's sleeping on, reeking of whisky, beer and cigarettes. He's a walking advertisement for staying home with a good book and Netflix. The highlight of his life seems to have been as a celebrity bartender, whatever that is. I guess that's for people who have no imagination and who think there's joviality in standing with some strangers in a bar and watching some guy yell jokes or whatever that's unintelligible over the din. I'd last about 20 minutes.

So, if you want to see what really smooth writing looks like, pick up this book. If you want to read about the seedy side of NYC before it was cleaned up in the 2000s (or whenever it was), this book offers that as well. But if you want to feel good about humanity, go somewhere else. This book is full of stupid, dishonest, broken people who stumble around searching for their next drink and false community. Though he claims he's telling the tale as a way of reckoning with the demons that haunted him, I don't buy it for a moment. He thinks he was great. He loved and needed the adulation of the idiots who surrounded him in his pointless endeavors. And he never comes to an understanding about the need part, nor the paths he could have taken.

An egotistical memoir by a confessed, but unrepentant drunk. A short read, but once you start, you know it's going to be sad , but extolling at the start his love of himself and booze. Having read Frank McCourt's books, I was expecting more, but it never happened. This was an opportunity for a one star which I have never given to a book I read.

Well, he's no Frank McCourt. That's for sure.