I bought this book to read when I was stranded in a rural city around halfway between Geelong and Adelaide while my car was being repaired...and read it I did, with great perseverence for holiday mode, for the next two and a half weeks, finishing it just before I was due to come home. NOT that it isn't an interesting book..it IS! But it isn't a book to be skimmed...do that, even for a second and you risk missing some vital detail.. a bit like the way I managed to turn my car over into a ditch!! The skeleton of this story is the progression of one humble button accordion..a green two-row button accordion, to be precise, from construction through to destruction......but that is the very BARE bones of the story...the padding, the flesh, as it were, is really the story of the settlement and colonization of the American continent. As the Sunday Express put it, rather well, I thought: ..The power and presence of this book cannot be overstated. For Proulx, the accordion is the symbolic instrument of unsuccessful men, of poor immigrants and failures. Lives are depicted in all their beautiful sadness but, as in all the best , tragi-comic writing, you are uplifted, inspired- in the case of Proux, by her intense passion for life and an inexhautible optismism in the face of tragedy..." And that paragraph goes part-way, perhaps, to explaining why I could not read this book in a few close encounters, not while on holidays, anyway! I was actually beginning to wonder if anyone COULD live happily ever after in this story..how many methods of violent death one can encounter in one small cylinder of print and stay relatively unaffected!! As The Times observed: "..The detail is breathtaking, her ear for dialogue matchless, her observation unsentimental, her pace infectious. She tackles death, sex and the gruesome with black hilarity and the skills of a born storyteller......" Well, I can't say I found all the suffering hilarious! But to each his own! What I DID was fold down so many pages with passages I wanted to type out for you , here, (this lady puts words together so well I HATE her!), that I could not possibly give my dogeared copy of `Accordion Crimes' to my America-bound friend to read on the plane, as I had intended. Instead, I had to chase him up another copy. (thankyou, Myer Adelaide!). Perhaps it can help him to more quickly adapt to his newly adopted country.... To take one more quote from the New Woman Magazine: "....This is a wonderful book. Proulx's combination of humanity, imagination and perception, coupled with her complete lack of any conventional or second-hand point of view, means she's one of the few authors successful in capturing a little of the essence of America..."

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