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Accordion Crimes

by E. Annie Proulx

Summary

This ambitious historical novel analyzes the experience of working-class Americans through the 20th century by tracing the fate of an accordion, brought to America in 1890 by a Sicilian immigrant. Annie Proulx's novel tells the successive stories of each person who acquires it, in the process providing a brief tour through American history.

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Media Reviews

"...'Accordion Crimes' is by no means a depressing book. Instead it seems properly clear-eyed, even shrewd with peasant wisdom....We must, it seems, find pleasure where we can, while we can-in food, in drink, love, music, stories. All these, of course, 'Accordion Crimes' supplies with the exuberant and loving excess of a good Polish wedding."    -- Michael Dirda

   -- Washington Post Book World

"...[A] panoramic mosaic of the immigrant experience in 20th-century America that confirms [Proulx's] oft-noted similarity to Steinbeck-and offers the most comprehensive survey of working-class life since Dos Passos's 'U.S.A.' trilogy....Proulx's point is that America's underclass...is especially vulnerable and (here we see her daring) prone to angry confrontation and early death. She faces it unflinchingly, and the results are grim, depressing, and memorable."

   -- Kirkus

"I can only blindly assume that her passionate evocation of the technicalities of accordion music is as accurate as her account of how to trap coyotes: her prose breeds conviction."    -- Caroline Moore

   -- Spectator

"It is easy for critics to make fools of themselves with grandiose claims; but in scale, in vision and in imaginative daring, 'Accordion Crimes' uses all the range and the resources of Proulx's mature prose. It is now safe to assert that she is a great novelist. It is a pity that she won all those prizes with the last novel, she deserves to win them again."    -- John Sutherland

   -- New Republic

"Ms. Proulx describes these people and their problems and their stubborn hopes for the future or regrets for the past with extraordinary conviction and a skill peculiarly her own. There appears to be no narrator between the reader and the characters. Here they are-this is what happens to them. Of course there is a narrator, invisible and omniscient, who slides into big scenes without warning, introduces important information as mere background detail, and arouses sympathy while seeming to cast a cold eye on all the action. Ms. Proulx is a magician."    -- Phoebe Adams

   -- Atlantic Monthly

"Out of the huddled masses Ms. Proulx has fashioned a teeming novel. Is it worth reading? Let's say that she can teach us to respect accordion music, but she can't make us love it."    -- Adam Begley

   -- New York Observer

America's ethnic minorities have rarely been rendered with the insight, intuition and unsentimental candor that Proulx brings to the large canvas of characters and reaches of landscape in this ambitious new work. The narrative has eight parts, each composed of short vignettes that depict the cultural baggage the attitudes, behaviors and social conditioning that immigrants brought with them, and the ways in which they joined, yet held aloof from, American society. Beginning in the late 1800s and ending 100 years later, the novel follows a vividly realized cast of characters, whose names are as colorful as their stories: Ludwig Messermacher, Abelardo Relampago Salazar, Dolor Gagnon, Onesiphore Malefoot, Hieronim Przybysz. Their common bond is ownership of a green button accordion, which was brought to these shores by a Sicilian immigrant and, after his death at the hands of a lynch mob, was transported back and forth across the continent by various combinations of inheritance, violence and bad luck. With mesmerizing skill, Proulx summons up the attitudes and speech of her characters, vigorously detailing a formidable number of settings, including New Orleans, Hornet, Texas, Random, Maine, Prank, Iowa, and Old Glory, Minnesota. She can evoke a teeming, fetid slum as clearly as she can a Montana ranch. An invariable characteristic of these immigrants and their families is the tendency to think of others as "Americans.'' In their own minds, they are still Italians or Germans or Norwegians or Poles or French Canadian or Cajuns. Almost without exception, they express ancient prejudices and newfound racism: the New Orleans natives hate the Italians, who hate the blacks; Iowa's Germans hate the Irish. What makes all this so spectacular is th at Proulx is a master at incorporating potentially numbing detail and specificity from the components of an accordion to the bloodlines of Appaloosas and the stages of a Polish funeral into her vigorous prose. Traditional ethnic music played by various characters during their brief ownership of the increasingly derelict accordion is conveyed with impressive authority. The range of scenes, from a drunken birthday party that resembles an animated Booth cartoon to a brutal reaction to a civil rights sit-in at a lunch counter, bespeaks a brilliant imagination. Proulx makes grotesque accidents, bloody catastrophes and bizarre events seem an inescapable part of human existence. If eventually some sameness of mood occurs, and a resultant diminution of tension, this is balanced by the reader's interest in the accordion's odyssey and in the lives it touches en route. For this is a cautionary tale in which pride and greed and self-delusion vie with basic human needs for love, comfort and spiritual sustenance. BOMC dual main selection; author tour. (June)

   -- Publishers Weekly

Proulx follows up her award-winning The Shipping News (LJ 2/15/93) with another show stopper. At its heart is an accordion made by an Italian who immigrates to New Orleans with his young son in the 19th century. The man is soon killed by an anti-Italian mob, but the instrument passes from family to family, all immigrants whether German, Mexican, Polish, or French Canadian whose lives are heartrendingly detailed. Proulx is clear-eyed and merciless in her description of their battle to survive hardship, prejudice, disease, and the death of loved ones for the chance to fulfill the American dream. Both beautiful and sobering, this book is highly recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/96.] Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

   -- Library Journal

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Scribner
Published date: 1997
Size: 5.25 x 8 inches
Weight: 0.95 pounds

Publisher's Notes

A button accordion brought to New Orleans in 1890 by a Sicilian immigrant finds its way into the lives, dreams, fantasies, sorrows, and intimacies of men and women of other immigrant groups in South Dakota, Texas, Montana, Maine and elsewhere.

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Simon & Schuster (1996) - from $1.00
• Paperback Reprint - Simon & Schuster (1997) - from $1.00

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