Rating: 
Summary: The lowly accordion comes to life
Review: "Accordion Crimes" is an imaginative and well written book. Readers who first encountered Proulx through "The Shipping News" will be pleased to discover that the author's knack for writing provocative and moving prose is alive and well in this 1996 novel. The central theme--the struggle of immigrants to assimilate themselves into American society while maintaining ties with their native culture--will strike a chord with many readers. The device used to explore this theme is a hand-made green accordion, brought to the US by an Italian immigrant in the 19th century. The accordion changes hands numerous times, with each new owner spotlighted in a separate chapter of the book.Fans of good writing will surely enjoy "Accordion Crimes." Most of the stories are dark and troubling. And only a handful of the characters are meant to be likeable. But the vivid storytelling will keep you turning the pages, as will the suspense of discovering the ultimate fate of the little green accordion ... and the treasure hidden inside of it. Those who are squeamish may be put off by Proulx's gruesome means of killing off her characters: suicide by chainsaw, electrocution by worm probe, being crushed under a collapsing cinder-block wall. It's enough to make Stephen King blush. In addition, the book is labeled as "a novel," but it's perhaps more apt to consider it a collection of short stories. As a result, character development and story lines are not as deep as they are in other Proulx novels. Nonetheless, those who read this book will likely enjoy enough of the chapters to make the experience worthwhile.
Rating: 
Summary: Not her best but still a treat
Review: 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. ACCORDIAN 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 ACCORDIAN 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 accordian) 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.
Rating:
Summary: Too much back story
Review: Clearly the author put a lot of thought into the back stories of all the different families who come into possession of the Green Accordion. Her frequent asides hint at the fullness of the story but each scene is so quick, so flitting that I found it difficult to engage any of the characters, save for the builder of the accordion. Each of these 50 page chapters could easily have been expanded into a separate novel making for a series of novels about the Accordion but I'm sure that her publisher wouldn't have wanted to take that much of a risk on a series of books about a musical instrument.
Rating: 
Summary: many characters, no variation
Review: Eggs fried in motor oil and cases of increasingly stupid vegetable matter with a taste for battery acid masquerading as humanity...
all of who own and variously misuse the green accordion over a hundred years. A nihilistic attitude combine with a misanthropic view of the human condition to give a realistic Greek tragedy as a set of serial short stories. When you are done reading it , you feel like you have been run over by a truck. I'd call it great original shock writing.
Rating: 
Summary: Sad Sad work by a writer I was supposed to "love"
Review: I had been encouraged to read work by Annie P, and this, unfortunately, was my first attempt. Really horrific novel, and truly mediocre writing. The plot meandered and the characters were barely sketched with a thin pencil. I would have enjoyed a thorough description of each person, say the three Germans in the beginning, for instance, and for her to stay with them and develop them a little. Instead she flits from character to character like a mosquito grabbing an evening meal in a teensy bit of blood and then flits along to the next victim of her characterization. I won't bother with anything further by this author, as I felt this booked was a half - witted attempt at giving a literary view of an accordion's life, but instead it was a mish-mash of heathens, misfits, murderers, thieves, liars, adulterers, poor victims. She seems to enjoy picking on many races - italians, germans, creole negroes, texans ... it is really awful. Don't waste your time, much less your money or your gray matter on this very, very, very bad novel.
Rating:
Summary: Serious students must read every word Proulx writes.
Review: I just finished Accordion Crimes and while I enjoyed it, I could not rank it with The Shipping News. In some ways TSN is an elongated short story rather than a novel but it is long enough to develop the characters, particularly the character of Quoyle, which is what makes the book so endearing. Accordion Crimes, on the other hand, is clearly a series of short stories bound together by the rather weak thread of a single accordion filled with thousand dollar bills traversing history. We see a progression of characters in possession of the accordion that are bound together by virtue of an interest in music, being in the USA as an immigrant and, inevitably for this book, tragedy. Because of the page constraints for each character, there is very little Proulx can do in the way of character development although I did laugh out loud during one of the late chapters at the character Fay McGettigan where he says "They didn't have no pissproof watches then." Proulx could have written a novel around any of several of the characters she does not develop in the book but, it wouldn't have been the book she envisioned. Perhaps her initial idea wasn't bad but, generally, I think Proulx got lost several times in what she apparently most likes to do, research arcane subjects. We are either treated or subjected, depending upon your point of view, to the results of many of these researches in Accordion Crimes. I generally like a good bit of description in a novel, but she got so carried away it detracted from the story, but then, unfortunately, she didn't have that much story to work with, which may be why she chose to fill the pages with her research. Having said all of this, the book is worth reading to get the occasional sentence or paragraph nugget which may be the main reason for reading Proulx in the first place. The woman can string words together in ways where noone has gone before. Any serious student of contemporary literature must read every word Proulx writes.
Rating: 
Summary: hard not to love this accordian
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Accordion lives
Review: I, too, loved The Shipping News and began this book eager to see where Proulx would take me next. Wow. Accordion Crimes has a certain bizarrerie that reminds me of Cien años de soledad, as well as displaying Proulx's dazzling command of the English language and encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of interesting things (unlike more than one reviewer on this site, I found most of the technical descriptions fascinating). As the grandchild of immigrants, I found it salutary to be reminded that not every immigrant family adapted as successfully as mine. I'm sure everyone will be shocked when I reveal that I know little about jazz music and am not particularly fond of the accordion, except as part of a klezmer band; what's impressive about this novel is that, despite this fact, I found this particular accordion's life story a real page-turner. As for the almost uniformly unlikeable characters ... well, unfortunately there are a lot of people in this world who aren't very nice, and it's about time someone wrote a novel about some of them!
Rating:
Summary: many characters, no variation
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Pass the Prozac
Review: This has to be one of the most depressing, dismal "novels" I have ever read, and I have a graduate degree in English. I thought it would be interesting since I play the accordion, but it wasn't. I, like other reviewers, struggled to finish this book. I have never read a book so filled with characters who are the scum of the earth. I get enough of that watching the local news here in Atlanta. If you're thinking about buying "Accordion Crimes," don't waste your money or your time. P.S. The correct spelling is accordion, not accordian!
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