cheesestringlover420's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
mcsayegh's review against another edition
3.0
There is just something about Annie Proulx's writing that I love. This isn't exactly a page turner and I even had to set it down for a while so I could bring something a little lighter on vacation. But the descriptions of classic Proulx hard-scrabble characters and places is terrific. Worth it when you have time to chew on words a bit.
skepticalmoose's review against another edition
1.0
This book sucked the life out of me. I hated it so much I made my sister read it, because I was sure I was missing something. (She hated it too.)
marisfess's review against another edition
3.0
I fell in love with Annie Proulx after reading Shipping News and chose Accordion Crimes to read next because the premise was fascinating. The story of a simple green accordion as it passes from its maker through a history of many hands. The story of America is told here, as each of the accordion players is from an immigrant family. Because so many stories crowd the pages, it is hard to identify with any one character. You start to care about the little accordion, but maybe not enough to keep everyone's interest. I still loved Proulx's writing. There are stories within the stories and everything that happens rings true. I wish I cared more about some of the characters and places, or that there was more of an overarching story to tie it together. Proulx gives us a little of that with the anticipation of who will discover a secret about the accordion, but it was lost in the tumultuous happenings that fill the book.
Writing is magnificent, the information is beautiful and historic, but the overall lack of narrative makes the reader work to remain engaged.
Writing is magnificent, the information is beautiful and historic, but the overall lack of narrative makes the reader work to remain engaged.
blueyorkie's review against another edition
3.0
An accordion passes from hand to hand in 19th and 20th century America. It is, therefore, the wanderings and the lives of his emigrants of various origins. Poles, Germans, French, Norwegians that we will follow, all constituting a superb picture of America made.
Annie Proulx is one of the great American writers of today, no doubt about it. And she's not well known enough. Read it! You can start with this book that you won't let go in.
Annie Proulx is one of the great American writers of today, no doubt about it. And she's not well known enough. Read it! You can start with this book that you won't let go in.
myrto229's review against another edition
3.0
Let me start by saying that Accordion Crimes, by E. Annie Proulx (1996), is beautifully written. The exquisite level of detail, the masterful evocation of time and place with only a few strokes of the authorial brush, the perfect balance between dialect and standard English in the voices of the characters: all these things are strong cases for why Proulx is such a wonderful writer. She’s a master of the craft. She also spent a lot of time learning about accordions or she plays the accordion herself. Either way, she knows a lot about how they’re constructed, how they’re played, how the different types of accordions are distinguished from each other. I was impressed by the breadth of her knowledge.
But I didn’t enjoy reading the book.
The novel is really a series of snippets from the lives of many characters, all of whom are tied together by the accordion. Several accordions appear in the narrative, but one in particular reappears throughout the stories (the “little green accordion”). The accordion comes to the US with the Italian immigrant who made it, and subsequently makes its way all around the continent, encountering all kinds of people along the way. The first story is set in the late 19th century and the book ends in probably the 1980s (I say probably because it’s not explicitly dated, but context clues allow me to guess).
I was really looking forward to reading this because I really liked Proulx’s The Shipping News, and of course she wrote the lovely and stark short story Brokeback Mountain. I also really like the accordion, so it seemed like a winning situation. But it wasn’t.
I’ve been trying to understand what I disliked about this story. Obviously it wasn’t the writing, but rather the stories themselves. I think that ultimately I disliked the fact that this novel seemed like one long litany of misery. Every single character in the book is miserable in one way or another. They inhabit their misery like a comfortable sweatshirt, and Proulx seems to take a perverse pleasure in reveling in the details of all their miserable lives. The squalid homes, the abject poverty, the tortured interpersonal relationships are produced in almost photographic detail in her prose.
It reminded me (only slightly, though) of the relish with which Upton Sinclair wrote the most awful passages in The Jungle, though without his smug moral rightness. In fact, Accordion Crimes was much more like an anthropologist’s obvious enjoyment in writing an obsessively “objective” account of some terrible practice like female circumcision. Exquisite detail takes the place of the anthropologist allowing herself to obviously revel in the squalor or violence.
For example, in one story, a man has suffered brain damage and is verbally abusive to his wife and physically abusive to his children, hates his life as a farmer, but is unable to pursue the work he likes because of the injury to his brain. One day a traveling snake-handling preacher sets up shop near the man’s farm. On the night that the preacher convinces one of the man’s children to play a role in the “healing” part of a church service, the man discovers the child’s involvement. He beats the boy nearly to death with a piece of metal cable, exposing the child’s vertebrae. The child’s mother is unable to stop him, and so she tries to kill the man by braining him with a piece of pipe. The man and child survive, but twenty years later, when the wife is on her deathbed from cancer, the man gets his revenge by killing her with an axe.
And all of the stories are like that. If they’re not physically violent, the characters are emotionally stunted, verbally abusive to everyone around. Several characters commit suicide, one dies when a load of lumber crushes his body, another dies in agony from brown recluse bites.
I wondered what purpose it could possibly serve, to portray so many people in such an unflattering light. I thought it might be a Statement on the Immigration Question because so many of the characters are either immigrants or are descended from immigrants. But others are not immigrants, so that theory doesn’t hold water.
Proulx didn’t disappoint me with her writing, rather I was further amazed by what a great writer she is. But reading this book was not enjoyable for me. Recommended if you have a high tolerance for other people’s misery, or if you’re a huge Annie Proulx fan.
But I didn’t enjoy reading the book.
The novel is really a series of snippets from the lives of many characters, all of whom are tied together by the accordion. Several accordions appear in the narrative, but one in particular reappears throughout the stories (the “little green accordion”). The accordion comes to the US with the Italian immigrant who made it, and subsequently makes its way all around the continent, encountering all kinds of people along the way. The first story is set in the late 19th century and the book ends in probably the 1980s (I say probably because it’s not explicitly dated, but context clues allow me to guess).
I was really looking forward to reading this because I really liked Proulx’s The Shipping News, and of course she wrote the lovely and stark short story Brokeback Mountain. I also really like the accordion, so it seemed like a winning situation. But it wasn’t.
I’ve been trying to understand what I disliked about this story. Obviously it wasn’t the writing, but rather the stories themselves. I think that ultimately I disliked the fact that this novel seemed like one long litany of misery. Every single character in the book is miserable in one way or another. They inhabit their misery like a comfortable sweatshirt, and Proulx seems to take a perverse pleasure in reveling in the details of all their miserable lives. The squalid homes, the abject poverty, the tortured interpersonal relationships are produced in almost photographic detail in her prose.
It reminded me (only slightly, though) of the relish with which Upton Sinclair wrote the most awful passages in The Jungle, though without his smug moral rightness. In fact, Accordion Crimes was much more like an anthropologist’s obvious enjoyment in writing an obsessively “objective” account of some terrible practice like female circumcision. Exquisite detail takes the place of the anthropologist allowing herself to obviously revel in the squalor or violence.
For example, in one story, a man has suffered brain damage and is verbally abusive to his wife and physically abusive to his children, hates his life as a farmer, but is unable to pursue the work he likes because of the injury to his brain. One day a traveling snake-handling preacher sets up shop near the man’s farm. On the night that the preacher convinces one of the man’s children to play a role in the “healing” part of a church service, the man discovers the child’s involvement. He beats the boy nearly to death with a piece of metal cable, exposing the child’s vertebrae. The child’s mother is unable to stop him, and so she tries to kill the man by braining him with a piece of pipe. The man and child survive, but twenty years later, when the wife is on her deathbed from cancer, the man gets his revenge by killing her with an axe.
And all of the stories are like that. If they’re not physically violent, the characters are emotionally stunted, verbally abusive to everyone around. Several characters commit suicide, one dies when a load of lumber crushes his body, another dies in agony from brown recluse bites.
I wondered what purpose it could possibly serve, to portray so many people in such an unflattering light. I thought it might be a Statement on the Immigration Question because so many of the characters are either immigrants or are descended from immigrants. But others are not immigrants, so that theory doesn’t hold water.
Proulx didn’t disappoint me with her writing, rather I was further amazed by what a great writer she is. But reading this book was not enjoyable for me. Recommended if you have a high tolerance for other people’s misery, or if you’re a huge Annie Proulx fan.
cfpharmd's review against another edition
2.0
Probably one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read… not because of the subject matter but because of all the unredeeming characters and all the sh*t the few likable ones go through or succumb to. If you like Darwin Award stories, then you may love this book as there are several in every chapter. While I love a fun polka, this accordion was in fact criminal.