Angela's Ashes
(Frank McCourt)
In ?Angela?s Ashes? Frank McCourt paints a picture of an achingly poor Irish childhood in the Limerick of the 1930s and 40s. His searingly truthful account exposes the degradation of extreme poverty, evoking both tears and laughter as he looks back unflinchingly at his past.
Born in New York in the1930s, McCourt was the eldest of five children, three of whom didn?t survive early childhood. His mother, Angela, was a Limerick girl; his father, Malachy, a charming, loquacious alcoholic from Northern Ireland. Frank?s appearance in the world was the accident that forced them into a marriage marred by his father?s inability to hold down a job or to stop drinking. In desperation the couple applied to Angela?s mother for money to pay their fare back to Ireland, where they settled when Frank was four.
Life in Ireland was miserable. The wet is what Frank recalls most. Everything was wet, People huddled together in church on Sundays? for his family as for many others, it was the only dry place. Malachy was out of work most of the time. A repeated pattern in the marriage was his failure to bring home the week?s wages when he did find work, spending it instead on alcohol and leaving the family without food. Their living conditions were dreadful, and Frank?s twin brothers and little sister all died, probably of malnutrition or TB.
The book recounts how one small boy managed to overcome this grinding poverty, how he discovered books while in hospital after nearly dying of Typhoid, how he later read voraciously in the library, and how he eventually found work and supported his family after his father?s final departure for England. We cheer him on as he saves his money and is eventually able to set sail for America and a new life.
What makes this story so readable is the directness of its language, its humour and lyricism, and its very Irishness. It is a book that will remain vivid in the memory.
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