Books › Accordion Crimes
Accordion Crimes
First published 1996 · 778 pages
A brutal, beautifully written odyssey through the fractured, polyphonic heart of the American immigrant experience.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like holding a heavy, weathered artifact that contains a century of ghosts. It is a sprawling, unsentimental journey through the harsh realities of the American immigrant experience, anchored by the passage of a single object from hand to hand. The prose is muscular and relentlessly detailed, immersing you in the sensory grit of different eras, from dusty borders to freezing logging camps. The mood is restless and often brutal, punctuated by flashes of dark humor and the transcendent, fleeting joy of music. It demands patience but rewards it with a profound, kaleidoscopic vision of survival and assimilation. This is a book for readers who crave dense, uncompromising historical fiction that strips away the myth of the American Dream to reveal the blood and sweat beneath.
- Mood
- gritty
- restless
- melancholic
- harsh
- Tone
- unsentimental
- unflinching
- darkly comic
- observant
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the illusion of the American Dream · cultural assimilation · the persistence of music · random cruelty of fate · immigrant struggles
- The writing
- Dense, muscular, and relentlessly detailed, packed with sensory grit and dark, unsentimental poetry.
- The arc
- Moves from the fragile hope of new arrivals through a gauntlet of brutal realities, culminating in a profound sense of tragic, inevitable decay.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate sprawling, episodic historical fiction and revel in masterful, uncompromising prose that refuses to look away from human suffering.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- historical racism and slurs
- xenophobia
- murder
- poverty
- animal cruelty
About the book
A tale of immigrants centered on an accordion brought to America in the 1880s. After its Italian owner is murdered, the instrument passes into the hands of other ethnic groups--German, French-Canadian, Mexican, Polish, Norwegian--and the novel describes their ceremonies, dreams and hates. By the author of The Shipping News.
Description from Open Library.
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