50 in '10: #22
Jul. 19th, 2010 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sakon76Title: Accordian Crimes
Author: E. Annie Proulx
Length: 381 pages
So, having enjoyed The Shipping News, I picked up another book by the same author. Had I written this book, it would have been titled something like The Cursed Accordian. Because what I learned in the course of reading it is that not a single person, or their family, who has emigrated to America in the last two hundred years, has ever had a happy life. In fact, given the increasingly inventive deaths (tripping into a boiling hot springs only to crawl out and fall into another even hotter one; suicide by chainsaw beheading; blind man wandering into the desert; a trio of Brown Recluse Spider bites, among other endings more pedestrian), I don't think the reference to Bangor Maine (most famous denizen: Stephen King) was an offhanded line. Oh, the research and cultural insights are quite nice, but hopping from family to family to family all the time is annoying. As are the unrelenting racism, callous death count, sexual perversions, and attempting to make the accordian a frame device. I was rooting for the damn thing to finally get destroyed.
Verdict: skip it.
Author: E. Annie Proulx
Length: 381 pages
So, having enjoyed The Shipping News, I picked up another book by the same author. Had I written this book, it would have been titled something like The Cursed Accordian. Because what I learned in the course of reading it is that not a single person, or their family, who has emigrated to America in the last two hundred years, has ever had a happy life. In fact, given the increasingly inventive deaths (tripping into a boiling hot springs only to crawl out and fall into another even hotter one; suicide by chainsaw beheading; blind man wandering into the desert; a trio of Brown Recluse Spider bites, among other endings more pedestrian), I don't think the reference to Bangor Maine (most famous denizen: Stephen King) was an offhanded line. Oh, the research and cultural insights are quite nice, but hopping from family to family to family all the time is annoying. As are the unrelenting racism, callous death count, sexual perversions, and attempting to make the accordian a frame device. I was rooting for the damn thing to finally get destroyed.
Verdict: skip it.
