Critics' choices for Christmas
Deen, Rosemary
Rosemary Deen Rosemary Deen, poetry editor for Commonweal, recently retired from Queens College where she taught writing. What I like in serious fiction are the pleasures of good drama: richly...
...The betrayer is distressed because the world is full of lies...
...The range and clarity of absolutely right detail is staggering...
...a peasant nun drilling rescued Jewish children in Catholic prayers and false identities ("What is your name...
...The little tailor dies silently, apparently by mistake and without witness, against a wall, but when the lorry bearing his body has been driven away, a woman dips her handkerchief in his congealing blood and bears it away "as a symbol of human martyrdom...
...Accordion Crimes shows us the "ethnic" and its dark other side: prejudice, virulent and commonplace...
...Its Polish title, Poczatek, means "Beginning...
...What I like in serious fiction are the pleasures of good drama: richly interesting characters caught in a grievous crisis presented in a highly condensed form, and the thrilling sweep, the history and information of epic and encyclopedia...
...They layer narratives, shift character focus in each section, and make the present back into the past and fast forward to the future...
...Proulx has a formidable genius, and here is its creation, a hundred years of an America you'll never meet so remorselessly anywhere else.where else...
...Szczypiorski gives us Poland in Warsaw just before the Ghetto uprising in April, 1943, and Proulx goes through a hundred-year span in the United States beginning with the lynching of some Italians in New Orleans in 1891...
...was to become a pitiful anachronism" because "totalitarianisms themselves practice banditry in the guise of law...
...Through this voice goes the other voice, of the music: "vibrant and keening," "wailing," "a voice like a blooded dagger," "breathy, sobbing roars," "sonorous, plangeant, shouting for grief to the mountain slope...
...There is one center, a little green accordion, made in Sicily and brought to New Orleans, and it is fated for destruction in the natural course of a hundred years because it is only an instrument of popular culture...
...The book has many centers, in seventeen fascinating characters, ranging from a judge, an old Polish nobleman...
...Januszek," answered a black-haired, curly-headed boy with the smile of an old dealer in cow hides...
...The grandson of a great Cajun musician "imitated his grandfather's singing style with eerie accuracy for a year, then slid over to swamp pop...
...Both engage a great sweep of national and cultural identity in crisis, Szczypiorski (pronounced sh-ch'-ep-yorski) in only 200 small pages and Proulx in nearly 400 pages of lightning prose, swift and deadly...
...Both heroes and villains appear very matter-of-factly...
...no character has any formal education, so the culture of the eye, reading and the visual arts, is absent...
...The Beautiful Mrs...
...Two books gave me these pleasures this year: The Beautiful Mrs...
...Through these centers you come to sense Poland as a place where Europe and Asia have always met, and where now "2000 years of European civilization" meet the first crude and as yet un-perfected form of totalitarianism...
...You finally realize you are seeing a whole culture and society as a living tissue...
...Seidenman by Andreej Szczypiorski (Vintage International, $9.95, 200 pp...
...In this structure of many centers, each life expands, opens out so you can see its origin, and ramifies to its end, all the while touching, connecting, meshing with the other ramifying lives...
...an old Socialist railway worker who can turn a wringer into a printing press because he understands not just machinery but "lies, truncheons, arrests...
...The most remarkable passages in the book are the vivid, precise evocations of music most of us would find unimaginable...
...But the cultures through whose hands it passes-the Sicilian, German, Mexican, French-Canadian, Cajun, Polish, Irish, Basque, Norwegian, and black traditions-fade and are lost...
...asked Sr...
...And it will hold...
...The author's voice is always detached, brisk, business-like as a well-written newspaper, no matter what bizarre tortures she bestows on her characters...
...The detachment, the fierce energy, the wild ordinariness of the grotesque- Proulx is very like Swift, who I always thought was incomparable...
...and E. Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes (Scribner, $25, 381 pp...
...a Jewish betrayer of Jews and a German officer...
...Weronika...
...a young man who had "chosen the career of a professional bandit, which in the era of great totalitarianism...
...hollowed with pain," like the effect of Proulx's own prose...
...The scores of characters are aliens, quite other than the sort of person who can read the book, but vivid and unforgettable...
...Seidenman is point-lessly named in this English translation...
...The little accordion's notes fall "biting and sharp...
...Finally, dried and soundless, the accordion is run over by a highway truck, scattering the fourteen $1000 bills an earlier owner had sequestered within it, in an image like the gold dust blowing away at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre...
...The eye has become the ear...
...The other astonishing fact of the book is the grasp of Proulx's research, all with the intense feel of primary source materials...
...The middle class, the stuff of novels, scarcely appears here...
...Neither writes a linear story...
...And I want the opposition between readable brevity and boundless scope resolved by an original, complexly economic structure and flawlessly energetic writing...
Vol. 123 • December 1996 • No. 21
