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Title: White Tears
Subtitle: A Novel
Author: Hari Kunzru
Narrator: Dominic Hoffman, Lincoln Hoppe, Danny Campbell
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
Language: English
Release date: 03-14-17
Publisher: Random House Audio
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 92 votes
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
From one of the most talented fiction writers at work today: two ambitious young musicians are drawn into the dark underworld of blues record collecting, haunted by the ghosts of a repressive past.
Two 20-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation. White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music.
Critic Reviews:
"Kunzru has done his homework on racial history and white privilege, but the novel is also lifted on his sharp descriptions of music, which he makes so concrete and delectable you understand why his misguided, ill-fated heroes fall so hard for it. A well-turned and innovative tale that cannily connects old-time blues and modern-day minstrelsy." (
Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
"A compulsively readable ghost story that features masterly - tour de force - writing about early American blues." (Rachel Kushner, author of
The Flamethrowers)
"
White Tears is a hallucinatory and eerily accurate journey into America's racial unconscious - like an updated version of
The Crying of Lot 49, in which race itself is the secret and arcane system that controls all of us in ways we never fully understand. In an era when the past seems to be collapsing into the present on a daily basis, you couldn't find a more urgently necessary, compulsively readable book." (Jess Row, author of
Your Face in Mine)
"Kunzru's latest offers a fascinating intermingling of the mistreatment of black Americans, immorality in the music field, and magical realism - all delivered by three talented narrators, Lincoln Hoppe, Danny Campbell, and Dominic Hoffman.... Hoppe, Campbell, and Hoffman perform this engrossing, convoluted tale with all its serious implications intact." (
AudioFile)
Members Reviews:
How the Blues Got There, Captain Jack
"White folks hear the blues come out, but they don't know how it got there," said Son House, a Mississippi blues singer who made his start in the 1920s. The blues got there, it is generally acknowledged, via the adapted rhythms and methods of West African natives enslaved in the American South. One of the blues' most customary components came from the group work songs of the plantation slaves who used the African practice of "call and response," which bluesmen have most often transformed into a conversation between the singer and his guitar. It is no coincidence that the Mississippi delta region so rich in fertile soil for large plantations is the birthplace of a veritable Blues Who's Who, including Muddy Waters, B.B.
