Customer Reviews

Accordion Crimes

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

This is an ambitious novel of Americana told through the device of an
accordion brought to New Orleans in 1890 by a Sicilian immigrant. The
book is peopled with a huge variety of colorful characters, and the
immigrant experience of Italians, Africans, Germans, Mexicans, French,
Polish and Irish people are depicted with her skillful social
perception, outstanding dialog and overflowing images of the
absurdities, chance circumstances and cruelties of their lives. Each
of her people die grim and violent deaths, and live small and hatefull
lives. There are dozens of characters and not one of them is happy or
finds fulfillment. It is a dark novel, which is grim and depressing
with occasional comic elements which only enhance absurdities of
life.

As I got more deeply into the book, I found it hard to pick up
because I knew I would be bombarded with another sad story of
someone's useless and pain-filled life. And then I couldn't put it
down because, in spite of this, the skillful writing would pull me
along. The stories are loosely strung together, with occasional
flash-forwards for one of the characters, usually describing another
future ugly meaningless death. She's writing about the underclass.
And the reverse side of the American dream. She does it well. So
well, in fact, that her images of lynching, illness, accidents,
abusive relationships and cruelty are not easily forgotten. It is not
a pleasant picture. But yet, it is surprisingly refreshing. Perhaps
because, in spite of her deep and colorful characterizations, the
reader doesn't feel particularly sympathetic to their tragedies and
meaningless lives.

It's a good book, but read it only if you are
unafraid to enter a world of unrelenting pain.

This is an ambitious novel of Americana told through the device of an accordion brought to New Orleans in 1890 by a Sicilian immigrant.

The book is peopled with a huge variety of colorful characters, and the immigrant experience of Italians, Africans, Germans, Mexicans, French, Polish and Irish people are depicted with her skillful social perception, outstanding dialog and overflowing images of the absurdities, chance circumstances and cruelties of their lives.

Each of her people die grim and violent deaths, and live small and hate-full lives. There are dozens of characters and not one of them is happy or finds fulfillment. It is a dark novel, which is grim and depressing with occasional comic elements which only enhance absurdities of life.

As I got more deeply into the book, I found it hard to pick up because I knew I would be bombarded with another sad story of someone's useless and pain-filled life. And then I couldn't put it down because, in spite of this, the skillful writing would pull me along.

The stories are loosely strung together, with occasional flash-forwards for one of the characters, usually describing another future ugly meaningless death.

She's writing about the underclass. And the reverse side of the American dream. She does it well. So well, in fact, that her images of lynching, illness, accidents, abusive relationships and cruelty are not easily forgotten. It is not a pleasant picture. But yet, it is surprisingly

refreshing. Perhaps because, in spite of her deep and colorful characterizations, the reader doesn't feel particularly sympathetic to their tragedies and meaningless lives.

It's a good book, but read it only if you are unafraid to enter a world of unrelenting pain.

In Accordion Crimes, Proulx wonderfully pulls together a cross-section of America for a hundred years to the present in interwoven short stories about the people whose lives intersect with a handmade accordion brought from Sicily to make its creator's fortune. The stories often end in the death of the current accordion owner which gives us in a dramatic way a sense that our own death will be as distinctively our own and as inevitable as the deaths of her characters. Instead of a great sentimentalized abstraction, Proulx shows that death is as ever-present as life, is the architect of life. In this book, even the accordion dies, slipping gracefully through its ages of usefulness, to disuse, to abandonment. This is a wonderful book and I recommend it to anyone who has been starved for REAL fiction as I have. Proulx is the real thing on a large scale. To those who were depressed by the book, I suggest taking a close look at their own lives because it seems to me they are wasting their time looking for meretricious comforts and have allowed their sensibilities to be lulled by too many soothing professional lies.

Annie Proulx is hard to beat as a writer who spins yarns and creates moods, places, and characters that live vividly in your mind long after the last capter of her always engrossing books is closed. ACCORDION CRIMES, by any other author, would have been cited an unqualified success, but Proulx has spoiled her legion of fans with her other books that intensively dissect characters whose lives she unravels in an inimitable way. In ACCORDION CRIMES all her gifts as a writer are intact but we lack a set of characters about whom we care. This book is more of a Canterbury Tales or a Thousand and One Nights with the unifying presence being that of an accordian passing from hand to hand among a fascinating but essentially unrelated group of emigrants. Proulx's immensely satisfying ability to inform us in detail about the most obscure subjects (such as the making and functioning of an accordion) alone satisfies the reader to stay with her journey from century to century. If there is a unifying element here it is the very heartbeat of the Americanization of foreign emigrants. And after all, we all are just that, at varying lengths of living here! A good read, if not up to Proulx's own high standards.

I, like many readers, came to Ms. Proulx after reading her much-acclaimed "Shipping News," and was delightfully surprised that she switches gears completely and successfully with each new novel. The plot of Accordian Crimes, if you can call it that, is written within the same vein as several other films and novels of the nineties. The premice: the author follows a single object through its lifespan--proving that the lives of our possessions are oftentimes more interesting than our own.

The green accordian of the title comes to the New World in the hands of an Italian musician. Both find themselves in New Orleans, itself an interesting melting-pot backdrop and initial setting. Proulx then follows the instrument through generation of immigrants: Italian, German, French-Canadian, Polish. Her prose is astounding and her language and history well-researched and authentic.

Most of the immigrant groups come across as very unrefined, but all are linked through their desire to preserve their cultural heritage through music. And the accordian--one of the most ridiculed of all instruments--is the desired musical means.

There is a twist to the ending which I found unnecessary, but all in all I found this book very engaging. I particularly recommend it to those interested in glimpsing a bit of the various groups that would leave their footprints across America, or what the United States was like before mass culture became the norm.

It is my favourite Annie Proulx trait: her brief asides in which the life story of a minor, passing character is summed up to its often funny end. And of these asides, Accordion Crimes is rife. A sweeping, relentless cascade of characters, all of which you care for and identify with, populate this book which is my favourite by Proulx. Annie is "baroque" in the good sense of the word, as every page of hers is rich with multi-layered threads and numerous directions to the story.

...from E. Annie Proulx. At turns funny, tragic and horrifying, "Accordion Crimes" tells the story of a small, green accordion as it passes through America from one immigrant or minority to another between 1891 and 1991. Through vibrant character sketches and textured historical context, Proulx exposes the similarities among and the prejudices experienced by Italians, Franco-Canadians, Mexicans, Poles, African-Americans, Irish-Scots and many other racial and ethnic groups throughout our history.

This novel is certainly not an easy read, but I think those who shrug it off as depressing and dreary are really missing a great deal of the meaining it has to offer. It may be true that many of the characters come to unpleasant ends, but they often also achieve some measure of happiness along the way. Proulx's message seems to be one of niether hope nor dispair, but rather of life-affirmation; for life is made of equal measures of both, and these characters, who experience so much of both, are vibrantly, powerfully alive. The accordian (which is a brilliant metaphor for America, since it is one common element among so many different ethnicities) is both a blessing and a curse; as the image with which the novel leaves you so beautifully suggests, it is a fountain of possibilities, good and bad.

Sadly, I have to agree with the naysayers on this one.

The stories of the accordion owners are all monotonously similar: they live hard lives and die horrible deaths, and they all seem perpetually conscious of the "issues" of ethnicity and assimilation (as we might term them today). This strikes me as overly simplistic to the point of being insulting, though I am sure Proulx did not intend this. As the daughter of an immigrant, I can tell you for certain that my mother did not spend all her days obsessing about whether her loyalties were to her country of birth or to America; nor did she hate every other race; nor was her life endlessly miserable and gruelingly arduous; nor could her story possibly be representative of her ethnic group as a whole.

Of course, it's very wrong to assume that a writer intends a portrait of a single character to represent ALL members of a particular "group." Obviously Proulx does not think that all immigrants are exactly like the ones in this book. But again, because all of the stories conform to the theme I've described, Proulx gives the impression that this is her book's "thesis." Whether she intended this or not, it's not a thesis with any depth or realism or empathy. It makes for a book that, as other reviewers have pointed out, appears to be full of stereotypes and flat, unbelievable characters.

I started Accordian Crimes as a book-on-tape. After listening to Side 1 of the first cassette, I pulled it from the tape player. THIS was a book to be read--and savored. I got a hold of the hardcover and found it hard to put down. Proulx is a fabulous writer whose research and talent allows her writing to go all over the place emotionally, geographically, historically, and ethnically. I think my favorite part was the chapter on the Germans in Iowa. Out of nothing they built a town; their grandson years later is beat up during WWI due to anti-German sentiment. The oversexed German and his obliging wife are great characters. I think this book could be required reading for any American history or sociology college-level class. The prejudice the characters face would make for an interesting discussion. This book though is LITERATURE, and it is just as good, just as American as anything the overrated Hemingway ever published.