“It’s like food,” says Frank McCourt. “Deprive people of food and they’re hungry. We didn’t have books – so any printed material that came into our domain was instantly seized on.”
As he recounted so memorably in the memoir “Angela’s Ashes,” McCourt’s early life in Ireland was rife with “miserable scarcity.” Yet from those hardscrabble beginning came a family of gifted writers. All four brothers McCourt – Frank, Malachy, Alphie and Michael – will touch on that when they speak at Symphony Space on March 31.
“Another thing about Ireland,” he tells The Post’s Barbara Hoffman, “was that anything that was any good was banned. When my mother was reading ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ she was hiding it, because there’s a scene there where the hero and his Spanish lover get into a sleeping bag and, as Hemingway put it, ‘the earth moved.’
“When I read it, I thought it was an earthquake!”
Here are a few other books that rocked McCourt’s world:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
That was a dream book for me. I lived near the river Shannon, and I’d wish it would turn into the Mississippi and I’d get on a raft with my best friend and sail off to Brooklyn . . . I loved the atmosphere of freedom, that “Go West” tradition. Even if you had Apaches ready to scalp you, the sun was always shining. It’s the ultimate American novel.
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
I’m now starting this new translation that just came out a few months ago. I didn’t understand anything in my younger days. Now I’m beginning to slow down and chew it.
Emma
by Jane Austen
For directness and simplicity, [there’s no one like] Jane Austen. It’s almost cinematic – the way she uses various groupings from time to time, in someone’s drawing room. I like her oblique humor and compassion, and how she wrote all these books when it was forbidden – hiding under the stairs, because women weren’t supposed to write then.
The Given Day
by Dennis Lehane
It’s a huge novel set in 1918 Boston, and a lot of it’s about baseball and anarchism and the whole Boston scene in those days. Someone reviewed it and said, “This goes beyond the usual detective novel because it’s more panoramic – it’s almost a ‘War and Peace’ of Boston.”