Accordion Crimes - Hardcover

E. Annie Proulx

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684195488 ISBN 13: 9780684195483

Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1996

Synopsis

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. 350,000 first printing.

About this title

Review

Proulx found fertile, if rocky, soil for her first two novels (Postcards and The Shipping News) in the far northeastern corner of North America. In Accordion Crimes she ranges much further afield. The novel follows an accordion from the hands of its maker in Sicily in 1890 until it is flattened by a truck in Florida in 1996. In the intervening century it passes through the hands of a host of unlucky owners and their kin: Abelardo Relampago, who dies from the bite of a poisonous spider; Dolor Gagnon, decapitated by his own chain saw; Silvano, cut down in the jungles of Venezuela by an Indian's arrow.

From the Publisher

Accordion Crimes traces the long odyssey of a button accordion, an instrument made by a Sicilian who immigrates to New Orleans in 1891. Imprisoned in a round-up of Italian suspects after the political murder of the chief of police, the accordion maker is lynched, and his accordion falls into the hands of Apollo, a black steamboat screwman. The instrument begins its long, erratic voyage through 20th-century America, passing through the hands of the descendants of slaves, immigrants and their children, some of whom learn that the cost of becoming American is to surrender the private definition of self.

Accordion Crimes is alive with vividly drawn characters who sometimes meet violent, strange ends, and who, at other times, succeed in a hard world. Filled with indelible images, Proulx's latest novel is charged with sardonic wit and is, at different turns, darkly hilarious and heartbreakingly sad. What we see as the accordion weakens and disintegrates is a haunting and ominous sense of what is America.

About this edition

• Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0684195488
• ISBN 13: 9780684195483
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384