![]() ![]() And one would be mistaken to call the energy Dillard exhibits in An American Childhood merely youthful "still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day," she writes, "as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.“ "The visible world turned me curious to books the books propelled me reeling back to the world." From her parents she inherited a love of language-her mother's speech was "an endlessly interesting, swerving path"-and the understanding that "you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself," not for anyone else's approval or desire. "Everywhere, things snagged me," she writes. The voracious young Dillard embraces headlong one fascination after another-from drawing to rocks and bugs to the French symbolists. In this intoxicating account of her childhood, Dillard climbs back inside her 5-, 10-, and 15-year-old selves with apparent effortlessness. ![]() She remembers playing with the skin on her mother's knuckles, which "didn't snap back it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge." She remembers the compulsion to spend a whole afternoon (or many whole afternoons) endlessly pitching a ball at a target. She remembers the exhilaration of whipping a snowball at a car and having it hit straight on. Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic." 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. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. 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. Yet Malachy-exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling-does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. 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. 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. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. "A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland. Presentation on theme: "Memoirs-In no particular order…"- Presentation transcript:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |