"Hastily, I transferred the snow to the burning part of the mattress and extinguished it, I thought, but an hour or so after I went back to sleep, the smoke revisited me.  Bounding out of the bed again, I went for a jug of water and sloshed it all over the spifflicated Paterson.  The man hardly stirred, but my mission was complete : Fire Out! and back to bed.

Sometime later I was awakened abruptly and rudely by a rough hand shaking and thumping me.  When I opened my eyes to see who it was that had the temerity to behave thusly, I almost had the cardiac seizure.  I saw a head crowned wit spikes of ice, icily protruding eyebrows and eyelashes, icicled dripping from the nose.  In a very high, indignant voice, the arctic apparition informed me that he was nearly frozen to death.  Never in his life had he been subjected to such a horrible place, and he was leaving, and there was no point in trying to stop him."

"In Zurich… Everything was neat and symmetrical and orderly, and not a thing in sight to disturb the color scheme.  Flowers, shrubs, and plants all clipped and leaning in unison to the direction of the unseen hand.  There were people washing and hosing pavements, cleaning windows, polishing bells, painting walls, and generally doing violence to the natural orders of things.  A weed poking its cheery little head up through a crack in a footpath would be cause for mobilization of the Swiss Army and their knives."

This book is the memoirs of Malachy McCourt,  who I’d never heard of before I read this book.  His brother is the author of Anglela’s Ashes,  which I have not read.

A lot of this book was funny, really really funny.  But then the rest was just his sad and slightly pathetic existence of drinking and making an ass of himself.  It was the drunken tales of an alcoholic.  The end was him screaming at his Father for being a drunk that abandoned his family,  yet really, it was the same thing he had done.  And that was it. 

It never went on to say if he became a good father - you know, one that didn’t leave the country for months on end, and didn’t spend every penny he had on the sauce, or ever got his shit together.

So beside some of the funny scenes, the beginning romanticized alcoholism, and the end was incomplete.

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