Angela's Ashes
1996
- irish americans
- irlandeses-americanos
- family
- social life and customs
- spanish language materials
- norteamericanos de origen irlandés
- children
- familia
- biografías
- childhood and youth
The story
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive 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." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. in the 1930s and 40s. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy -- exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling -- does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors -- yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. - Jacket flap.
What it’s like
Rain-soaked Limerick streets and coal-smoke tenements rendered in a voice that is wry, rhythmic and often funny, the prose carrying the cadence of Irish speech, scraps of Catholic ritual and the sing-song of an old storyteller. Long stretches of close, sensory detail pile up: damp rooms, cold hands, the sour smell of a pub, the hiss of a fire built from roadside coal, the warmth of a neighbour's kitchen. The mood swings between bleak hunger and bright, bittersweet tenderness, so the book reads as cozy melancholy rather than despair. Its pace is episodic and unhurried, moving through a child's years in short chapters that can be dipped into one at a time. Hardship is constant: poverty, near-starvation, illness, a drunk father, and the petty cruelty of relatives and neighbours, with sickness and death handled plainly and some harsh scenes of humiliation, though violence is mostly brief and never gratuitous and there is no sexual content. Its emotional arc follows a boy learning to survive by listening, imagining and forgiving. It suits a rainy Sunday, a slow read at night, or readers who want a warm, funny, heartbreaking childhood memoir and a strong sense of place.
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