Discuss Francis McCourt is to consider the reasons that lead to write a book. Because that first book, regardless of whether it marks a literary career or if it finally remains in a simple narrative incursion, strips the author in front of the world.
It may already be the most detached work of fiction from reality, deep down certain essences of the author are transferred to settings, characters or dialogues. And the first time what is written reaches the public, it can seem like a trial.
Surely McCourt would write his stories, he would sketch those stories that so many of us have explored since childhood or youth, but facing the book for the first time, in that fuller volume, has more of a declaration of intent than a literary claim. Even more so when that first work reaches the age in which McCourt did it, with his more than sixty springs at the ready.
All this comes about the special nature of this author's debut work. Angela's Ashes is that fully authentic memoir as to be absolutely exciting, and far enough away from certain episodes of life to acquire that almost fantastic point between melancholy, the chronicle of the times lived and the vital justification of what the writer himself became.
Straddling a city like New York, which can just as easily integrate anyone in its diversity as alienating it in its complexity, and the small and ancient Limerick (Ireland), McCourt composes in his work, above all, the mosaic of his life, with that point of universality of the smallest existence, with that odysseic review of everything lived by someone pushed to emigrate, to search for the site at all times.
With which this situation of constant learning is finally deduced, optimal to write about the adjustment of the subjective to the changing reality while life is taking the first footnotes ...
Top 3 Recommended Books by Frank McCourt
Angela's ashes
The vision of the world from childhood can be fascinating in that essential empathy of who we all were. Great Books of the history of literature are based on that narration of the child who observes the world and interacts with the book of labels or more calloused stigmata.
Who has not read The Little Prince fascinated as an adult, or has been touched by stories like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas or The Life of Pi? ... Any childhood story written with that mimicry towards the most candid, and at the same time free, vision of the world has many ballots to enter a reader without defenses, exposed to that first existence in paradise.
Except that McCourt's paradise is blurred into a stark reality that, by habitual contrast with most childhoods, invites a maximum humanization of the history of this emigrant with a round trip ticket.
Professor
In the end, McCourt's work is a sum of visions of the author made the protagonist. Main character of a life undertaken from survival in opportunity and effort and casually revised in a sum of biographical parts made into a novel.
And this time we traveled to 1957 to meet Frank, now a citizen of that western universe called New York.
His first days as a teacher begin towards a disconcerting horizon, since he discovers that the strictly academic modus operandi does not serve the ultimate cause of education. One of those books about the exercise of teaching when such activity is undertaken from conviction, vocation and commitment. A book that, in the interaction between the teacher and his students, shows how, to educate, you must first know who you are educating.
It is
When the recognition of a work, from the beginning as simple as Angela's Ashes, reaches an absolutely unexpected dimension, it is normal that the bewildered McCourt was encouraged by sequels that, although they did not manage to regain the brilliance of the original, continued to contribute to the history.
Because if any well-told childhood can be the most fabulous of books, what concerns awakening to maturity would have for many other genres of all kinds. The boy who has just arrived in New York, with his limited world and his young age that barely exceeds 18, presents himself to his new world with the doubts of any emigrant but with the drive and commitment of that time in which life is gold.
As those days of youth passed, we discovered the seams of a world sold as what it was not. New York could be a monster that devoured any lukewarm spirit. Only determination, faith and new dreams could make McCourt the person he always wanted to be. And without a doubt that destiny is always carved out in these magical, dangerous and furious years of life.
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