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3.48 AVERAGE
3.48 AVERAGE
This sprawling intergenerational drama centers around intricately portrayed immigrant characters' lives and their interactions with a green accordion as they navigate America's harsh realities and brutal tragedies.
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Racial slurs, Racism
This is not a linear novel, not a story that follows one person or cluster of people along a given trail. Instead, there are a host of characters of different ethnicity in diverse settings; they are linked by a little accordinan built by a Sicilian man in the 1890s before he emigrated to New Orleans. Proulx is a powerful writer. the book is filled with memorable sentences and descriptions and characterizations. Each segment is laced with dense detail about the music or culture or personalities. At one point I thought that this could be well used in history classes to get a handle on the nature of intolerance. What lingers is awe at her ability to step inside the soul of the different groups she traverses. At times the links from person to person as the accordian changes hands seemed a bit tenuous, yet in the end this is a marvelous book.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is more like a book of short stories with a through line than a traditional novel (the accordion is the only continuous "character"). It's very slow-paced but once I accepted the format I came to appreciate the wide range of stories, places, and cultures represented in its pages.
dark
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
informative
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A painful read. Long, repetitive, and dragging. I love some of Proulx's work, but this one catalogued nothing but the shittiness of the immigrant experience, the shittiness of America, and the shittiness of humanity. The accordian seemed cursed because nearly every person who encounters it loses everything and/or dies in unique and excruciating ways (Final Destination style). Proulx's eye for detail and her historic research are remarkable despite this trainwreck of a novel.
I did like some of the stories, mainly at the beginning of the book: the German, the Mexican, but towards the end, it started to blur together and it was getting boring, I did not care about any of the people: the cowboy, the Polish, The trash picker. It was a struggle to finish it.
Proulx is such a consistently fine writer, a spinner of tales across centuries and cultures that are somehow constructed by a single person able to conjure dozens of disparate voices. Love this author.