I wasn’t completely swept off my feet by this much-loved Irish autobiography, but I had an enjoyable engagement with it. McCourt’s grim take on his childhood poverty in Depression- and WWII-era Limerick is simultaneously depressing and bemusing.

Characters are fairly allegorical, though not without surprising complexity. Priests are inflexible, laughable and contradictory–though not all of them. Extended family members are condescending, bigoted and hypocritical–but not all of them, and not all of the time.

A few gems stand out: the janitor at the hospital where McCourt endures typhoid; a shut-in who has been shattered by his experiences in the English army in India; a forgiving and patient Franciscan priest.

The constant hard knocks. Repetitive, rhythmic sorrows of death and poverty and alcoholism. You see them coming up on the story’s horizon and you’re powerless to defuse them. It’s hard at times, to read. His father’s drinking is especially hard to tolerate because it’s such a helpless situation.

Everything is painted so grey: the lane, the dingy, flooded house, the River Shannon. So when something happens driven from love, the color it shoots into the story is blinding. Guilt and perseverance bind families and neighborhoods together. It is a nice frame of reference through which to grasp a basic understanding of the era.

I went in prepared for something that was aimed at the heartstrings. Perhaps as a result of this steely preparation, my tears were not jerked. But I was touched, if not moved. ( )

Book #21 of 2008 for me!

Tags: biography, irish, memoir

lyzadanger’s review: “I finished this nigh a week ago but I’m still challenged to say exactly how I feel about it.Reading this book is like getting off a bus and finding yourself in a third-world country where you not only don’t speak the language, but you don’t even understand the brand of humanity exercised around you. It’s a whirling confusion of sweetness paired with inhuman destructiveness. From my admittedly sheltered perspective, the leap of understanding required to conceive of how anyone could behave this way, playing fast and loose with human life in such an elementally evil way, is difficult to grasp. But I suppose that is the point.

All that said, I find that I like Beah. Anyone who can start sensitive, devolve into the Heart of Darkness and somehow come back again is a deep character in my book.

Watch out reading this if you, like me, are sensitive to graphic imagery. There were times when I had to force myself to keep reading, assuring myself that I *needed* to know about this, to understand this chaos. I found it difficult to read at night or when I was feeing tense.”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2007), Hardcover, 240 pages

**** (of 5)
, Read for Book Club

Tags: 50 book challenge, africa, autobiography, bookclub, memoir, nonfiction, read, readin2007, sierra leone, war