Accordion Crimes

Gail Caldwell Boston Sunday Globe A daringly intelligent work with a soul as wide as the Mississippi. John Sutherland The New Republic In scale, in vision and in imaginative darling, Accordion Crimes uses all the range and the resources of Proulx's mature prose....She is a great novelist. Kathleen Byrne Globe and Mail Review of Books Crisp and authoritative, her spare, dense prose is mesmerizing ...A majestic novel. Phoebe-Lou Adams Atlantic Monthly Splendid...Ms. Proulx is a magician. Michael Dirda The Washington Post Book World You would think Proulx would have the simple decency to make her third novel merely so-so, if only to let someone else grab a little limelight. No such luck...She now seems to know everything about writing. And a fair amount about life, too.

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.