Accordion Crimes
A green two-row button accordion built in Sicily comes ashore at New Orleans in 1890 with the man who made it, and afterwards passes by theft, sale and accident through German, Polish, Mexican, Franco-American, Norwegian and Irish hands across the continent. Each owner plays a different music on it and meets American violence in a different form — a lynching, a factory floor, a border patrol, a farm machine. Proulx spent years on immigrant instrument-making and built the book as a relay in which the object, not any person, is the continuous thing.
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Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 62% · 15 shared
- 59% · 13 shared
- 54% · 12 shared
- 53% · 12 shared
- 52% · 13 shared
- 52% · 12 shared