2 posts tagged “angela's ashes”
The library's copy of Angela's Ashes is dog-eared beyond repair. That's how I roll. (PS: This man has never met a conjunction he didn't like.)
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. [pg. 11]
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. [pg. 12]
Not until late December did they take Male to St. Paul's Church to be baptized and named Francis after his father's father and the lovely saint of Assisi. Angela wanted to give him a middle name, Munchin, after the patron saint of Limerick but Malachy said over his dead body. No son of his would have a Limerick name. It's hard enough going through life with one name. Sticking on middle names was an atrocious American habit and there was no need for a second name when you're christened after the man from Assisi. [pg. 17]
This maddened Malachy again and he wanted to jump at the priest for calling the child some class of a Protestant. The priest said, Quiet, man, you're in God's house, and when Malachy said, God's house, my arse, he was thrown out on Court Street because you can't say arse in God's house. [pg. 18]
The ship pulled away from the dock. Mam said, That's the Statue of Liberty and that's Ellis Island where all the immigrants came in. Then she leaned over the side and vomited and the wind from the Atlantic blew it all over us and other happy people admiring the view. Passengers cursed and ran, seagulls came from all over the harbor and Mam hung limp and pale on the ship's rail. [pg. 46]
The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live. [pg. 113]
He'll go to the cinema the rest of his life, sit next to girls from lanes and do dirty things like an expert. He loves his mother but he'll never get married for fear he might have a wife in and out of the lunatic asylum. What's the use of getting married when you can sit in cinemas and do dirty things with girls from lanes who don't care what they do because they already did it with their brothers. [pg. 117]
The boys in Leamy's don't want Fintan praying for them and they threaten to give him a good fong in the arse if they catch him praying for them. He says he wants to be a saint when he grows up, which is ridiculous because you can't be a saint till you're dead. He says our grandchildren will be praying to his picture. One big boy says, My grandchildren will piss on your picture, and Fintan just smiles. His sister ran away to England when she was seventeen and everyone knows he wears her blouse at home and curls his hair with hot iron tongs every Saturday night so that he'll look gorgeous at Mass on Sunday. If he meets you going to Mass he'll say, Isn't my hair gorgeous, Frankie? He loves that word, gorgeous, and no other boy will ever use it. [pg. 156]
She slams the door in our faces. We don't know what to do till Billy Campbell says, We'll go back to St. Joseph's and pray that from now on everyone in Mickey Spellacy's family will die in the middle of the summer and he'll never get a day off from school for the rest of his life.
One of our prayers is surely powerful because next summer Mickey himself is carried off by the galloping consumption and he doesn't get a day off from school and that will surely teach him a lesson. [pg. 172]
Grandma is there to help and she says, That's right, no hope in heaven for the infant that's not baptized.
Bridey says it would be a hard God that would do the likes of that.
He has to be hard, says Grandma, otherwise you'd have all kinds of babies clamorin' to get into heaven, Protestants an' everything, an' why should they get in after what they did to use for eight hundred years? [pg. 182]
He tilts over on the chair and farts and smiles to himself and I know now I'm going to get better because a doctor would never fart in the presence of a dying boy. [pg. 192]
I feel sad over the bad thing but I can't back away from him because the one in the morning is my real father and if I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can't say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You're allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head. [pg. 210]
'Tis my son, sir. He has two bad eyes.
Oh, by God, he does, woman. They're desperate-looking eyes altogether. They look like two rising suns. The Japs could use him on their flag, ha ha ha. [pg. 226]
I get under the cows and squirt the milk into Alphie's mouth till he's full and throws it up. Farmers chase us till they see how small Michael and Alphie are. Malachy laughs at the farmers. He says, Hit me now with the child in me arms. [pg. 247]
And Mrs. Purcell says, Do you know what, Frankie?
What, Mrs. Purcell?
That Shakespeare is that good he must have been an Irishman. [pg. 275]
Everything is damp and musty and Laman Griffin snores over our heads. There are no stairs in this house and that means no angel ever on the seventh step.
But I'm twelve going on thirteen and I might be too old for angels. [pg. 278]
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it's a fortnight since my last confession.
And what have you done since then, my child?
I hit my brother, I went on the mooch from school, I lied to my mother.
Yes, my child, and what else?
I- I- I did dirty things, Father.
Ah, my child, was that with yourself or with another or with some class of beast?
Some class of beast. I never heard of a sin like that before. This priest must be from the country and if he is he's opening up new worlds to me. [pg. 293]
He said it was very awkward hopping up on the bike with his thing sticking out but if you cycle very fast and think of the sufferings of the Virgin Mary you'll go soft in no time. [pg. 315]
Frank McCourt lives in Limerick, Ireland, dire poverty, and to tell the tale. His story is beautifully written, and you fat American's with your nine course meals and NAAFA will never be able to match his accomplishments.
The Ireland of Frank McCourt has never seen a leprechaun in its entire tormented 800 year history, but it has seen sorrow and poverty and the English. McCourt's Ireland is desperately proud, desperately poor, desperately pious, and just plain desperate; without a dependable navigator, Ireland is all uncomfortable sob-story and weepy heart, and Angela's Ashes would read like 368 pages of a Feed the Children Marathon, but with McCourt at the steering wheel Ireland gets the opportunity to be bittersweet and funny.
McCourt elevates this memoir from simply another book capitalizing on another depressing childhood to a story that is bitterly funny. It takes a special kind of narrative voice to move a memoir - to make it rise above glurge and self-absorption, to make it readable and even fun - and McCourt has it in spades. Is he sometimes ineffective? Yes. Is he sometimes unsympathetic? Yes. Does he abuse run on sentences? Hell yes. But he always has a grip on the reader's attention, and has the dual gift of: (a) a subtle but hilarious sense of humor and (b) the ability to sometimes knock a sentence (or a sentence that is a paragraph long) out of the park. Furthermore, McCourt is grimly empty of self-pity which means his Limerick and all its people remain mean, cruel, capriciously kind, and very, very complex.
All these elements put-together means that I am of course thrilled with this book and will use words like provocative, touching, heart-rending, and beautiful to prove it. I will also molest McCourt's precise prose without shame and try to pillage his style. This will not work and I will throw myself into the sciences and alcoholism.
ADDENDUM: Ok, so the book sort of sagged towards the end. The thing is, with a memoir there's not much to keep you chugging along. And with a memoir about abject poverty instead of, say, Roald Dahl's smashing times with the RAF, it's not so much a question of AND THEN DID FRANK RISE OUT OF THE SLUMS AND KILL HEINRICH HIMMLER WITH A JET PLANE but NOW WHAT KIND OF TERRIBLE THIRD WORLD INFECTION DID FRANK PICK UP? This, admittedly, is not enough to keep my miniscule attention span. Also, the end of the book has a lot more sex (or the 'excitement' as McCourt likes to call it), which I would normally cheer on but: (a) first of all, the man calls it the 'excitement' which is about as randy and exciting as a woman referring to her coochie as a 'flower', no; and (b) I had the misfortune of looking at the book jacket and saw McCourt's craggy 60 year old face peering at me through his enormous bushy eyebrows and the thought of him hooking up on a couch pretty much ruined everything. In short, McCourt's way of describing sex pretty much has all the appeal of your Grandpa talking about the nice O-ree-ental woman he met and bedded during his tour of Asia against the Japs and Hitler.
This section is long and really pretty irrelevant towards my overall enjoyment of the book, but STILL IT WAS BOTHERING ME.
