Product Description

The third novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Shipping News', 'Accordion Crimes' spans generations, continents and a century and confirms the hallucinatory power of Proulx's writing. 'Accordion Crimes' is a masterpiece of story-telling that spans a century and a continent. It opens in 1890 in Sicily, when an accordion-maker and his son, carrying little more than his finest button accordion, begin their voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion-maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynch mob, but his instrument carries the novel into another community of immigrants: German-Americans founding a new town in South Dakota. Moving from South Dakota to Texas, from Montana to Maine, the nine instantly compelling and intricately connected sections of the novel illuminate the lives of the founders of a nation, descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Germans, Irish, Scots and Franco-Canadians. Through the music of the accordion they express their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28014 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Review
`The melting Post of 20th-century America comes to life in her hands' Waterstones Books Quarterly
-- WATERSTONES BOOKS QUARTERLY

About the Author
Annie Proulx published her first novel 'Postcards' in 1991 at the age of 56. 'The Shipping News' won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award and the Irish Times International Prize. Her third novel, 'Accordion Crimes', was published in 1996. She is also the author of three short-story collections, 'Heart Songs' (1994), 'Close Range' (1999) and 'Bad Dirt' (2004). 'Brokeback Mountain' was made into an Oscar-winning film in 2005. 'Fine Just the Way It Is', her third collection of Wyoming short stories, was published in 2008.

Customer Reviews

...or around the USA in 100 years
I loved this book - in fact I can't remember having read a better one for years.
On the surface, it's the story of an accordian, from it's manufacture by the first owner and then through the lives of consequent owners. As a musician I related to the perceptive descriptions of the players of the instrument and all the other characters - of which there are many!
But the theme is of immigration to the United States, and the often tough lives of those who moved there from diverse countries and cultures. The accordian is seen as an old-fashioned instrument, much like the traditions and cultures the immigrants have left behind, and the pressure (for most characters in the book) is to conform, give up tradition, their old languages and their old music and become 'true' Americans.

Darkly humourous, funny yet tragic, this deep novel takes us through the 20th century (never too specific on date) with great historical detail and reads like a linked collection of short stories. I recommend it.

Up there with the Shipping News
A damn fine book in the tradition familiar to Proulx's readers. Overall perhaps not as complete an achievement as "The Shipping News" but sections of the book read as well as anything she has written prviously. The story follows the progress of a green accordion as it passes through the hands of owners from a variety of national origins and classes. In this way Proulx tells the story of the development of the United States and its immigrants from the 19th centuary to neasr the present day. The accordion interweaves the stories of the characters and provides a thread to the narative. A book of haunting images.

Tedious parade of horribles
A disappoininting, depressing book, chock full of every imaginable form of death and dismemberment. Proulx's fascination with the grotesque is numbing at first, but by book's end it is merely laughable. The accordion is really not much more than a clever gimmick to "link" what might have worked as independent short stories. It is is hard to defend a novel about the immigrant expreince which is so devoid of humanity, love and faith. Proulx's version of American history is so drenched in blood, that all else, with the notable exception of some brilliant passages about the joy of music,is obscured. While it could be argued that it is refreshing not to encounter soft-hearted, sentimental ethnic stereotypes, it is disheartening that she still manages to paint the Poles as hard drinkers, the Mexicans as somewhat lazy and the Norweigans as repressed and cruel. The book's redeeming feature is her wonderful, lean prose. Proulx has described her writing as "muscular" and that it is. Better off reading the The Shipping News and call it a day.