Download An only child ePub

by Frank O'Connor

Frank O'Connor Science Fiction English

ISBN 0839828799
ISBN13 978-0839828792
Language English
Author Frank O'Connor
Publisher G.K. Hall (1985)
Pages 275
Formats doc lit txt mobi
Category Fantasy
Subcategory Science Fiction
Size ePub 1741 kb
Size Fb2 1603 kb
Rating: 4.2
Votes: 403

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Book by O'Connor, Frank

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Frank O'Connor's An Only Child offers such a contrast, one I find useful to my own writing since it reflects to a. .I really enjoyed O'Connor's Book. I connected far more with this story than with Angela's Ashes, and McCourt was my English teacher

Frank O'Connor's An Only Child offers such a contrast, one I find useful to my own writing since it reflects to a significant degree my own experience while growing up in an Irish Catholic household. O'Connor sets up the contrast between the two extremes almost immediately, using his own personality as illustration, since, unavoidably, we are all products of our biological parents. I connected far more with this story than with Angela's Ashes, and McCourt was my English teacher. The familial relations and the characters were vivid and typical of their era and I felt transported to Ireland of the early 20th Century.

Start by marking An Only Child as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. ant to Read.

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O'Connor's early years are recounted in An Only Child, a memoir published in 1961 which has . O'Connor continued his autobiography through his time with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which ended in 1939, in his book, My Father's Son, which was published in 1968, posthumously.

O'Connor's early years are recounted in An Only Child, a memoir published in 1961 which has the immediacy of a precocious diary. President John F. Kennedy remarked anecdotally from An Only Child at the conclusion of his speech at the dedication of the Aerospace Medical Health Center in San Antonio on 21 November 1963: "Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when.

Электронная книга "The Autobiography: An Only Child and My Father's Son", Frank O'Connor

Электронная книга "The Autobiography: An Only Child and My Father's Son", Frank O'Connor. Эту книгу можно прочитать в Google Play Книгах на компьютере, а также на устройствах Android и iOS. Выделяйте текст, добавляйте закладки и делайте заметки, скачав книгу "The Autobiography: An Only Child and My Father's Son" для чтения в офлайн-режиме.

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The story of the title deals with a little boy named Larry and his feelings towards his father. The first two volumes of O'Connor's autobiography. When his father returns home from World War II, Larry is resentful and jealous of losing his mother's undivided attention, and finds himself in a constant struggle to win back her affections. AN ONLY CHILD is the entrancing story of an Irish childhood and a youthful involvement in the Irish rebellion which leads to internment. In MY FATHER'S SON O'Connor is released after the Civil war to begin a turbulent career as a writer, sharing his life and loves in Dublin with characters as formidable as Yeats and Lennox Robinson.

Raised an only child in Cork, Ireland, to Minnie O'Connor and Michael O'Donovan, his early life was marked by his father's alcoholism, indebtness and ill-treatment of his mother. He was perhaps Ireland's most complete man of letters, best known for his varied and comprehensive short stories but also for his work as a literary critic, essayist, travel writer

The story of Frank O'Connor is that of a shy child from a Cork slum who becomes aware that there is something beyond the confines of his life and the lives around him, something grander. And with resolve and labor, he makes his way toward it. From his childhood to the time of his release from imprisonment as a revolutionary, O'Connor conveys the moral fortune and the tragic elements of life, that sparked his storytelling - a life he describes as a "celebration of those who for me represented all I should ever know of Go. show more.

Frank O'Connor (1903-1966) is known primarily for his short stories, and fine ones they are. There are seventeen of them in this Reader, and the best of them, in the words of Richard Ellmann "stir those facial muscles which, we are told, are the same for both laughing and weeping. Except for the masterpiece, "Guests of the Nation," the stories included here have been out of print for twenty years, and one story had been previously unpublished. But this is a Reader and it celebrates the creative diversity of one of this century's finest writers.

Talk about An only child

Coirad

The contrast between the "mother" image and the "father" image as reflected within a particular culture and the subsequent effect of that contrast on the family dynamic add an interesting dimension to a childhood memoir. Although admittedly a generalization, the Irish mother as the strong, dependable, hard-working individual worthy of near sainthood in sharp contrast to her shiftless, abusive, self-pitying drunkard husband often appears in literary works written by Irish writers. There seems to me to be little argument that the veneration of the Irish mother figure is not surprising in a culture that typically holds the Virgin Mary in higher esteem than her son and that lovingly refers to its homeland as "Mother Ireland." Frank O'Connor's An Only Child offers such a contrast, one I find useful to my own writing since it reflects to a significant degree my own experience while growing up in an Irish Catholic household.

O'Connor sets up the contrast between the two extremes almost immediately, using his own personality as illustration, since, unavoidably, we are all products of our biological parents. O'Connor indicates that while he has the "passion for gaiety" as displayed by his mother, he is dismayed that he too often reacts the way of his "father's family, which was brooding, melancholy, and violent." He maintains that his mother married beneath her, despite the fact that it was his mother who grew up in an orphanage, and describes at great length how his father, "a naturally melancholy man," went on frequent drinking binges during which he would miss work, verbally abuse his family, and spend every cent at his disposal in the pubs while his wife and son nearly starved. O'Connor frequently refers to his embarrassment and disdain for this man whose warped self-image was of "a good man and kind father on whom everybody and everything turned" and went out of his way to avoid him whenever possible. The Irish father in this memoir somehow still has pride but it is a false, undeserving pride, just as his self-image as the martyr is false, the genuine martyr being his faithful, devoted, long-suffering wife. Unfortunately, the lack of a father deserving of his child's love and admiration results not only in the disillusioned child's greater dependence on the mother but also in a life-long search for and attachment to other men who become the "father figure" replacements. For O'Connor, the focus rests primarily (though not exclusively) on Corkery, a teacher, poet, and artist whom the narrator admires for "his gentle, fatherly way." As everything the biological father is not, Corkery, becomes the mentor, the "authority for everything," and loved because of "how well that gentle little man understood" his protege.

In direct opposition to the Irish father, the Irish mother in An Only Child represents the ideal of both motherhood and womanhood and provides the strength to keep the family afloat. In a culture and during a time-frame when "(Irish) homes were matriarchies," the narrator turns to his mother for the love and approval his father withholds and, by doing so, only incurs greater wrath from his father. Insults of "sissy" and "Mother's Boy" are hurled at the child who even begins to identify himself as such. Naturally, the diametrically opposed mother and father frequently clash, but through it all, the mother (the true martyr) stoically attempts to bear the brunt of the neglect and abuse, stays with her abuser so her own child will not end up on the streets or in an orphanage, and "rarely asked anything for herself." The narrator's devotion to his mother becomes so strong that it is only well into his adulthood, and only at her death, that he "learned for the first time the meaning of parting and death."

As the only child in such a volatile household, O'Connor frequently (even if silently) took sides, and it is not surprising, given the family dynamic (as well as the cultural veneration of the "Mother" figure), that his loyalty inevitably lay with his mother. Of course the ultimate choice (at least metaphorically) occurs when the narrator decides to forsake his father's surname in favor of his mother's.

Keel

O'Connor is rightly famous mostly for his short stories, but his criticism - both The Lonely Voice and A Mirror In the Roadway - along with this volume of his memoirs, well, they're all just really good. I found this book in a library many years ago and there are a hundred scenes that still spring instantly to life, and sentences that are always going to be part of how I look at the world. He betrays his greatest talent in the fact that the book reads like a collection of wonderful chapters rather than a coherent whole, but each is filled with the spirit of a generous, funny, humane man, one of those rare authors that you wish you could hang out with. The people that assure that books keep getting read seem to be forgetting about O'Connor a little, but the pages they keep alive rarely seem to stay in the blood and brain like his do.

Jum

I really enjoyed O'Connor's Book. I connected far more with this story than with Angela's Ashes, and McCourt was my English teacher. The familial relations and the characters were vivid and typical of their era and I felt transported to Ireland of the early 20th Century. It was a fantastic read!

Glei

Like Frank, I grew up Catholic, so I greatly enjoyed his account of his childhood and the deftness at which he relayed the characters and situations of his life in early 20th century Northern Ireland. The account of his father's alcoholism and mother's strength in her modesty evokes powerful sentiments that O'Connor is amazingly skilled at.

He overly criticizes the adolescent ideations and development out of his youth (bildungsroman), but it gives insight to his development as a writer (kunstlerroman), of which he is a candid and lucid artist.

I felt the novel creeping a bit in the middle (otherwise I would give it 4 or 5 stars), and the transition is a bit murky to his engaging recount of actions against the British occupation of Northern Ireland and surrounding religious strife. The ridiculous skirmishes and characters are painted with his masterful brush, however, and truly bring the era to life.

It is a story worth the read to the end on many levels.

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