Accordion Crimes Book

Accordion Crimes traces the history of a small green accordion, as it's passed down through the hands of generations of various immigrants to America. I have read and liked The Shipping News, and the concept of this novel appealed to me immensely - I'm fascinated by immigrants/emigrants and their experience of leaving the home country and adopting to the new one, full of hopes for a better life - often escaping dire poverty and persecution. During the great transatlantic migrations at the turn of the 19th century, as many as 30 million Europeans voluntarily came to the Americas - many of them to the United States, which was thought of as the land of gold.

While some prospered and became wealthy, many found the land they came to to be a place of empty promises - and hard work. Often having no possibility of returning to their home country, the immigrants had to stay and make someone else prosper. There's a great quote attributed to an anonymous Italian immigrant of the early 1900's: "I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, found out three things: First, the streets weren't paved with gold; second, they weren't paved at all: and third, I was expected to pave them."

Appropriately, Proulx begins her novel with the story of an immigrant from Sicily - the maker of the accordion, who ventures with his instrument to New Orleans, with high hopes and dreams of a musical career. Upon arriving he discovers the bleakness and harshness of life in Louisiana, and is forced to do menial labor; New Orleans brings an end to his story, but the accordion survives. It travels all across the country and beyond, from Louisiana to Quebec, passing from hand to hand. Proulx gives voice to a vast group of immigrants of different background - Italian, German, Polish. I'm Polish and always get a kick out of Polish themes in foreign literature, and was very pleased to see that a whole portion of the book is devoted to Polish immigrants and their culture and society.

The book is relentlessly brutal - prejudices and racism among different ethnic groups guarantee for a great amount of violence, and Proulx catalogues one bloody incident after another; some of them are so grotesque that they are almost beyond belief - and sooner or later the reader will start wondering when the new characters are going to be dispatched, and what stroke of miserable bad luck will fall upon them. Proulx also has an annoying habit of providing summaries of what happened to some of the characters, important or not; these are provided in brackets after their role in the book is done. This gets old really fast, since the vignettes are so short and we barely get time to get interested in these people.

Because the immigrants are unrelated, and what connects them is only the small green accordion (and a string of bloody and grotesque unhappy events) the book feels disjointed and put together from a collection of individual stories without clear guidance, lacking coherence and a sense of progression. The Shipping News had Quoyle, his family and acquaintances and a wonderfully conveyed sense of place; characters of this novel are interesting but sketchy at best, and the jumps in the setting provide an interesting look at various immigrant settlements but without getting into too much detail - after all, it covers a century within its pages. Accordion Crimes, although very readable, seems to me to be more of an experiment which starts strong but goes out of tune as it nears the end. It's worth reading, but doesn't carry the impact of its predecessor.