Frank McCourt (1930–2009)

«Cuando recuerdo mi infancia, me pregunto cómo pude sobrevivir siquiera. Fue, naturalmente, una infancia desgraciada, se entiende; las infancias felices no merecen que les prestemos atención. La infancia desgraciada irlandesa es pero que cualquier otra infancia desgraciada, pero la infancia desgraciada irlandesa católica es la peor de todas...». Así empiezan Las cenizas de Ángela, uno de los grandes fenómenos editoriales de los últimos años.

En ellas el autor nos cuenta, con el fino show more humor que le caracteriza y en el que se trasluce un extraordinario espíritu de supervivencia, cómo su familia logra salir adelante en medio de una terrible pobreza y a pesar de todo tipo de adversidades. show less

I'm glad everyone else in the world has already read this book, because it means I don't have to immediately call everyone I know and force them to read it. This is truly one of the most heartbreaking books I've ever read. It's the kind of book that makes you want to go back in time and fix the past, until you remember that there are still people starving to death, there are still people without access to education or the most basic health care. And then you just want to crawl in a hole and show more forget about everything, or get really drunk, or both. But instead you finish Angela's Ashes and then move on to a book everyone says is funny, but that 'funny' book turns out to be about a kid who gets his head run over by a mail truck, is orphaned, and lives in an awful, terrible, dangerous 'boy's home,' and even when things start going good for him, you know there's just more danger around the corner. And then the next thing you know, you're a god damn nihilist and there is no turning back.

Or maybe that's just me. show less

When Angela sees the Christ Child lying in his crib at St. Joseph's Church, near her home in Limerick, Ireland, the young girl believes that he must be terribly cold. Determined to spare the child a form of suffering which which she is all too familiar, she steals him, taking him home in order to keep him safe and warm. Her brother Pat discovers her secret, and eventually gives her away to the family, who insist that the statue must be returned to the church. But what will the parish priest show more and the local policeman do, when they are discovered trying to return him...?

Originally published in 2007 as Angela and the Baby Jesus, this lovely holiday picture-book from Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the memoir, Angela's Ashes, was reprinted this year (2019) as Angela's Christmas. I greatly enjoyed McCourt's memoir, many years ago when it was first published, but I never read the sequels, nor was I aware until recently that he had written a children's story, based upon one of his mother's childhood experiences. I'm glad that I have discovered this, as I found the story equal parts humorous and heartwarming, and appreciated both the moving conclusion, and the beautiful artwork by Raúl Colón. Recommended to anyone looking for deeply felt Christmas stories for children, that are both entertaining and poignant. show less

Has there ever been a worse life than Frank McCourt's? Certainly, if you were a slave on a Mississippi plantation in the 1850s or a Jewish resident of Auschwitz in the 1940s, you would say that McCourt had it pretty easy over in Ireland. Still, it's hard to deny the power of McCourt's memoir "Angela's Ashes" as he describes the hard-boned early years of his life in Limerick.

I was deeply affected reading about the struggles of the McCourt family--father Malachy, mother Angela and children show more Frank, Malachy, Oliver, Eugene and Margaret. There has never been, nor will there ever be, as personal a portrait of poverty as this one.

Life--in the form of the Irish addiction to a wee bit o' drink--has beaten down the elder Malachy until he is no longer able to provide for the family. Father flees to find work in England but neglects to send any money home, leaving his wife and children, already living in squalor, to further fend for themselves. They steal and beg and tear wood from the walls to burn in the stove. They get their nourishment from tea so weak it's just colored water. They live like sardines in a flat so miserable that every year they have to cram themselves into an upstairs room when winter floods and overflowing toilets make the place only half-habitable.

The memoir--an astoundingly detailed recollection--is a series of vignettes of poverty, cruel schoolmasters, and disease and death. Frank survives (just barely) an existence so horrible that it would have given Dickens nightmares.

"Angela's Ashes" would not be the phenomenal success it is without the poignant voice of Frank McCourt. Seldom have I read an author who can take me from tears to laughter in the same sentence. The prose is gritty, realistic and never self-pitying.

McCourt spent most of his life composing this memoir and such patient devotion definitely shows through. Each page, each sentence is carefully crafted to paint a vivid word picture. Here, for instance, is our introduction to the streets of Limerick:

"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 p*ss wafting in from the outdoor jakes where many a man puked up his week's wages."

I'm sure the Limerick Tourist Association is not sending McCourt any love letters these days. Still, it's possible to see the author's nostalgic attachment to the city--if only as a benchmark of the place where he triumphed over bad luck, disease and indigence.

McCourt is as clear-eyed when it comes to describing the people in his life. Just take a look at our initial introduction to the wayward head of the house:

"My father, Malachy McCourt, was born on a farm in Toome, County Antrim. Like his father before, he grew up wild, in trouble with the English, or the Irish, or both. He fought with the Old IRA and for some desperate act he wound up a fugitive with a price on his head. When I was a child I would look at my father, the thinning hair, the collapsing teeth, and wonder why anyone would give money for a head like that."

The prose is never flowery or padded. It gallops forward in a breathless stream of consciousness that will have you alternately wanting to take it slow to savor each word, while rushing ahead to see what's next. To speed your eyes along the page, McCourt dispenses with quotation marks, like another favorite writer of mine, Cormac McCarthy. The style can be off-putting at first, but you'll soon find yourself rocking in the rhythm of his gentle Irish lilt.

Save for the closing pages when Frank finally escapes Ireland and boards a boat for America, there is no relief from the grim, unrelenting struggle of this family. But McCourt always manages to find humor and joy even in the darkest hours.

As he writes in the opening paragraphs, "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." While I would never wish hard times on anyone, I'm glad they visited Frank McCourt. We are all the richer for his miserable childhood. show less