Accordion Crimes
From AwardAnnals
| This creative work has a long or truncated description. Please review the creative work guidelines concerning descriptions and edit down or replace the description. |
 | |
| Author(s) | Annie Proulx |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | A Novel |
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Honors | |
| Rarely has a literary novel so captured the hearts and minds of readers across America and the world as E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Now we have Proulx’s new novel, Accordion Crimes, a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. Accordion Crimes opens in 1890 in Sicily as an accordion maker completes his finest instrument and dreams of owning a music store in America. He and his eleven-year-old son, carrying little more than the accordion, voyage to… | |
Rarely has a literary novel so captured the hearts and minds of readers across America and the world as E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Now we have Proulx’s new novel, Accordion Crimes, a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent.
Accordion Crimes opens in 1890 in Sicily as an accordion maker completes his finest instrument and dreams of owning a music store in America. He and his eleven-year-old son, carrying little more than the accordion, voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynching mob, but his instrument carries Proulx’s story as it falls into the hands of various immigrants who carry it from Iowa to Texas, from Maine to Louisiana, looking for a decent life. The music is their last link with the past—voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance—but it, too, is forced to change.
Proulx’s prodigious knowledge, heartbreaking characters and daring storytelling unite the sections of Accordion Crimes—a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
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.
