this is a book that is really not describable or something is categorisable.
Its really well written and i think that if you are interested in this book, go for it. Give it a try.

Starting out as a relatively normal narrative about two (white) men obsessed with music, old music and/or authenticity, the novel spirals into a post-modern, creepy morass full of conflicting time lines, ghosts (maybe), the loss of white/class privilege, and how easily black people could find their lives unfairly changed. It could be easy to lose the reader but I quite enjoyed myself picking through the whirling plot lines to find the three main threads.

I always think the best music books should have you immediately wanting the listen to the music described in them and even though this is a work of fiction it had me wanting to rush out and start hunting round record shops for rare blues records.

Our narrator is Seth, a shy misfit with an obsession for music and audio equipment who finds himself striking up a friendship with Carter, a rich kid with a large trust fund and equally obsessed with producing music. Carter bankrolls a studio and the two find themselves on the brink of superstardom as wonder kid producers when a chance recording made by Seth changes everything. Often recording as he walks, Seth catches a man singing a few bars of what sounds like an old blues song and when he plays it to Carter the two of them become obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else. Events soon take a dark turn and its at this point that the novel changes from what I'd assumed was a story about cultural appropriation into something else altogether. To say much else would be to spoil too much but the line between what is real and a bizarre fever dream becomes blurred to say the least.

This book is a tour de force and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it in the past couple of days since I finished. The author has obviously done his homework here and there's plenty about the world of record collecting and traders which is fascinating to read such as the encyclopaedic knowledge of catalogue numbers and how collectors have to earn their spurs before the big boys of the collecting world will trade with them. There's enticing snippets about the way old blues music was recorded which make me wonder if that's born out of the author's imagination or based on a real blues singer. Either way it makes for sometimes devastating reading.

Needless to say I don't think I'll ever listen to blues music in the same way again and I'm left slightly upset that the music Seth and Carter were working on isn't real, that's how good this book is! Do yourself a favour and grab a hold of this as soon as you can.

I received a ARC from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.

It feels like one of the great functions of literature can be to give a voice to people who have been rendered voiceless through whatever pitfall in history. The same can be said for music which can so powerfully convey the stories of entire groups of people whose voices have been suppressed, ignored or erased by those in power. This is certainly true with the history of Blues music which was originated by African Americans in the Deep South and continued to grow and evolve through generations and decades of black oppression in America. In Hari Kunzru's latest novel “White Tears” he tells the story of an emotionally-arresting Blues song rediscovered by a pair of earnest young musicians and the dramatic effect it has on their lives. But this isn't a simple story about musical admiration or influence. Kunzru posits the compelling idea that a sound once uttered resonates indefinitely throughout history and he weaves this concept into a fascinating detective story which slides into the surreal. It’s a novel that makes powerful statements about race, privilege and the long-lasting resonance of music.

The narrator Seth meets Carter Wallace at university. He’s humbled that Carter wants to be his friend because this dreadlocked, tattooed, trust fund boy is so popular and comes from an extremely wealthy family. But they connect over music and Seth’s tech-savvy ability for capturing sound and turning it into beats and rhythms. Unsurprisingly, Carter is the black sheep of his corporate-driven family, but he’s still allowed money enough to found their music production business once they leave school. Their creative fusion of forgotten Blues and Jazz tunes with modern songs garners them a lot of attention including from an incredibly successful new pop artist that wants to pay tribute to bygone music eras. But Carter becomes obsessed by a particular song that Seth happens to record in passing. It leads them on a strange path into the past and a musical genius that’s been lost in history.

There’s a steadily growing tension within the novel about the way these two white boys become attached to a black music tradition. Are they demonstrating an admiration for it or appropriating it? Seth feels that “our love of the music bought us something, some right to blackness, but by the time we got to New York, we’d learned not to talk about it.” Because they are passionate about it, they feel themselves to be in touch with the culture that created it. Seth also recalls a kind of friendship he made with a white male co-worker, Chester Bly, who was an avid Blues record collector and actively sought out forgotten musician’s work: “They were like ghosts at the edges of American consciousness. You have to understand, when I say no one knew, I mean no one. You couldn’t just look something up in a book. Things were hidden. Things got lost. Musicians got lost.” Seth sets out on a journey of discovery for music, but finds himself immersed in a culture and people that he doesn’t understand and didn’t even knew existed within his own country. Here things get very odd within the narrative.

The novel eventually transforms into a hallucinatory story where the boundaries of identity become blurred and history plays back upon itself. Seth becomes caught in a loop of time as if he were in a Beckett play: “I look down at my hands. I have always been looking down at my hands, but as in a dream when you find yourself unable to read text or tell the time, they are vague.” I found this style-shift somewhat alarming and disconcerting at first, but it eventually became really emotionally resonant for me. The later part of the book feels something like a Cesar Aira novel. The story of a man who has been greatly wronged erupts through the chaotic breakdown of Seth’s life. So it becomes partly a tale of possession and partly a revenge tale and partly a testament to an entire race of people that’s been continuously oppressed throughout American history. “White Tears” is a resonant and peculiarly haunting novel.

I loved the fact that Hari's latest book revolved around music. Found it slightly difficult to get into at first but it soon settled down and I began to enjoy the content. You don't need to know about Blues to enjoy it as the premise reflects how music can affect people on different levels. The two main characters are actually haunted by a piece of music in very different ways and with different outcomes. I did however feel the later third of the book needed work as it became confusing before the final reveal. Overall, a good read.

Singing the blues...

When Seth and Carter meet at college, they discover a shared appreciation for music – not as musicians, but as listeners and producers. Seth has the technical skills and Carter's family is rich, so they're able to set up their own studio. Loving the distinctive sound of vinyl, Carter eventually works his way back in time till he has become a knowledgeable collector of old 78s, especially blues. Seth too had gone on a musical trip back in time, during a period in his teens after his mother died, when he isolated himself from the world in his room and escaped into the world of early records. But Seth had reached a point where he believed he could hear ghosts behind the music...

This is another of these books that is quite hard to review because it only slowly reveals where it's heading, and the journey is probably better the less you know going in. It's also very distinctly a book of two halves, and other reviews I've read suggest that people who love the first half are disappointed with the second, and vice versa. I'm lucky in that I vastly preferred the second half, so that my final opinion of the book was much higher than it had been at the halfway point. I'll try to give you an idea of it without spoilers, so forgive me if this review is rather vague.

The first half is taken up with the boys, later young men, meeting and becoming friends and then business partners. Seth is the narrator and he tells about how he records street sounds while he's wandering about, often finding when he listens back to them that he can hear things he wasn't aware of at the time. At first, this is normal stuff – the kind of sounds we all tune out as we pass through noisy places. But one day he discovers that he has recorded a man singing an old blues song – he remembers the man singing a line or two but not the whole song. This is the beginning of a train of ever stranger things that happen until eventually the narrative becomes fractured and disjointed, as the book moves further from reality into a kind of weird, hallucinatory stage in the second half.

The first half contains a lot of music jargon, production techniques, comparisons of analogue and digital, and so on; and I frankly found it dragged. But once it began talking about early blues musicians, I found my interest reviving a little, especially since it sent me off to youtube to listen to many of the recordings Kunzru mentions. Even so, for too long I found I didn't really have a feel for where the book was heading.

I'm glad I stuck with it, though, because the second half not only gives the book its ultimate meaning, but as Seth's life, or perhaps mind, or perhaps both, spiral out of control, I loved what Kunzru does with the writing. It becomes almost like reading a vivid dream – short sentences giving us a glimpse of a thing or snatching at a sound, then moving wildly away to the next thing. Often just a few words create a picture in the mind. It becomes disorientating and strangely disturbing after a bit, and I found it totally compelling. The narrative shifts around in space and time, in reality and illusion (delusion?), and the story gradually gets darker and more violent. It's only towards the end that the destination becomes clear, and only then that I was able to truly appreciate how each stage, each strand, had added to the depth beneath the surface words – not unlike listening to the analogue rather than the digital.

And, in the end, it's about race, and cultural appropriation, and race guilt. About how music, specifically recordings, can let us visit the past. How acquisition can become more important than art – ownership and control above appreciation. There are references to blackface and minstrelsy, and white tourism of black history. The last chapter becomes a little polemical for my taste, but until that point I felt the messages were handled with both surface subtlety and underlying power, and a great deal of originality. And it has stayed in my mind in the couple of weeks since I finished it, growing in stature the more it settles, so that, despite the fact that it took me a while to get into it, I now feel that the long first half was necessary to create the foundation for the weirdly wonderful second half. Highly recommended.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Penguin Books UK.

This is quite some novel. The quote that prefaces White Tears ends with the line ‘I didn’t know right from wrong’ and somehow the story of Seth, a recording engineer obsessed with sound, who makes his own recording equipment sensitive enough to pick up voices from the past, unfolds into a tale that brings history into the present forcing old wrongs out into the light in a way that offers no redemption. What has happened is always happening, remnants of old sound waves reverberating around us, waiting for us to tune into their frequency.
So whilst the novel is about music, most specifically the blues, it is also about race and the history of black slavery and oppression in America. The white tears are those shed by the privileged, desperate to make up for the behaviour of their ancestors but unwilling or unable to part with their winnings.
The old song Seth picks up on his equipment pours the past into his ears and those of his partner, Carter, the youngest of the rich and influential Wallace family who built their wealth in the South through the labour of the unfairly imprisoned or badly paid black man. Longing to hear authentic sound, the two young men find themselves living the authentic suffering that infuses the blues they love so much.
White Tears is part detective story, part cautionary tale and a definite new contributor to the great American novel. From the first pages I felt myself drawn in, there was a feeling of Paul Auster-like biblical puzzle, and a love of language, a respect for the sound of words that draws you through some dark and magical storylines.
By the end my teeth are on edge, my heart has worked its way into my mouth, and I no longer know what is right or wrong, how any of us can hope to understand or atone for a past whose black tunes sing right out of our white noise.
White Tears is an impressive and frightening novel that wonders when we’ll be able to step inside a human skin and forget its colour; when we’ll be able to protect the dispossessed rather than those with money. However we try to bury the wrongs of the past, in White Tears it can never be fully erased, its angry buzzing always whining at the edges of our conscious hearing.

This novel is a wonderful example of 21st century gothic writing and is incredibly creepy, atmospheric and hauntingly beautiful. It tells the story of Carter and Seth two music buffs in their early twenties, but it is so much more than that. It is an exploration of obsession and madness, privilege and poverty, racial and class divides and throughout, it is punctuated with obviously well researched references to blues records from the early twenties and thirties. There are moments in the novel that are linear in construction - plot proceeds chronologically and event follows event - and then there are points at which all times seem to blend into one and you really don't know who is telling the story anymore and indeed, what the story is that is being told. Sometimes, this makes the book a little hard to follow, but the beauty of the writing is such that as a reader, you have to continue through to the conclusion. It's dark and demented and utterly brilliant.

I was introduced to British born New York resident Kunzru via his 2004 novel “Transmission” which I loved. That was a laugh-out-loud work with good line after good line and probably the funniest novel about a computer virus that you could ever imagine reading. Excited by what I believed to be a major talent I went back to his 2002 debut “The Impressionist” which did not impress me as much. I felt it ran out of steam and it was written largely in the present tense, which does not always work for me. When I heard his latest was about record-buying obsessives I was very keen to find out more.
Seth meets rich boy Carter Wallace, a record collector prepared to splash the cash if he feels the music is authentic. Seth, an audiophile himself, who records his day to day movements in the streets, becomes drawn into this obsession as it begins to be dominated by old shellac 78 rpm Blues records. This becomes one record in particular, “Graveyard Blues” by Charlie Shaw- a record so steeped in authenticity that no-one is sure that it ever even existed. This hunt for Shaw becomes part crime story, part ghost story, part road story and part love story all infused (for the first half at least) with the wry humour that made “Transmission” so enjoyable.
And then, about two thirds of the way through the whole thing begins to unravel. Has obsession turned to madness or is something more supernatural on the loose? Is this recompense for white men dabbling in Black American culture in order to manipulate, exploit, possess and obsess? Sometimes, when a gear is changed and the author appears to veer off in a different direction it can prove exhilarating for the reader but at other times it can feel as if we have been left behind. And on this occasion, unfortunately, I did feel Hari Kunzru did leave me behind and I didn’t really get what was going on. The whole thing begins to feel feverish and we seem to be presented with alternate endings as what was going on felt blurred. It reminded me in the way this made me feel, rather than the size and scale of 2015’s “City On Fire” by Garth Risk Hallberg, which I also had reservations about. Ultimately, my very high hopes were a little disappointed. Perhaps I was too consciously looking for more of what I got from “Transmission” but here I didn’t quite find it.

White Tears was published by Penguin/Hamish Hamilton on April 6th 2017. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

This is a really strong novel, one that lifts the barricade of time and brings the blues from gentle historical curiosity under glass to a visceral beating bloody heart of a thing, a scream of outrage at injustice down through the decades. What starts as a tale of college boys messing with music swings into fullblown horror by the end, but there is none of the cosy distance of genre here. The only monsters are human, there are no silver bullets or crosses, no escape. In these years of Trayvon Martin, Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, it's a timely read, powerfully fuelled by passion and rage.

This book is many things and many of them are unexpected and disorientating. What starts as a wry look at urban hipster culture turns into a blistering polemic on cultural appropriation and the idea of "white tears". Alongside these wider moral themes is a tense, fast-paced storyline that revels in a love a music and plunges us into the world of early blues record collecting.

Carter and Seth are two young white men struggling to find their places amongst the expectations of the world and their very different families. Seth lost his mother in high school and suffered a nervous break, obsessing about discovering the sounds of the past through recording of his everyday life. Carter is the younger son in a multi-billionaire family who slips into his own obsession with "authentic" sound, eschewing any digitally mastered music and searching for the "pure" blues music of the pre-digital age. Despite this self-righteous quest Carter (with Seth doing most of the actual work) sets up a recording studio with his family's money and they attain some moderate success marketing a stripped back, analogue sound. This is where the exploitative elements of cultural appropriation emerge as this sound is marketed to modern stars (often white) with no inkling of the painful history of blues and jazz music, rooted as it is in slavery and racism. While recording his daily walks Seth catches a song sung by a "faceless" black man while playing chess, with no sense of guilt or any appearance of thought the two men recreate the song and post it online, claiming it as a rediscovered, original record. Their situation becomes increasingly complex as the are caught up in the surprisingly cut-throat world of record collecting with violent consequences.

The moral(s) is strong and Kunzru doesn't pull any punches as he picks apart the contradictions and hypocrisies of his characters. Seth has few real qualms about the use of the appropriated record, his unease only coming to light when the consequences threaten his livelihood and he pleads for his rights over his intellectual property. This duality, a racism that is rarely accepted or characterised as prejudice is the inspiration for the provocative title. So many of the characters identify with the idea of our "post-racial" world but their actions and words reveal the internalisation of racist attitudes. Carter and Seth's attitudes to African-American music, its sound and "realness" represents a sanitisation that wilfully ignores the roots of the music they love in the brutal oppression and exploitation of the people who made it. Seth recognises the exploitative nature of this blinkered view when he says admits that during their student days "We really did feel that our love of the music bought us something, some right to blackness, but by the time we got to New York, we'd learned not to talk about it". What he fails to realise is that his present actions are simply a more insidious, and less innocent, expression of the same attitudes.

It is Leonie, Carter's older sister who comes the closest to understanding the problematic nature of their position, "My Brother feels guilty for being a rich boy." she tells Seth, "That's why his heroes are always poor and black... It's theirs [blues music]. They'd rather you left it to them." She is not particularly likeable and certainly doesn't seem to realise that her own pretensions to the bohemian art scene mirror the behaviour of her brother but in this she is still one of the more clear-sighted characters.

The action is well-played and Seth and Carter's reality becomes uncertain as the consequences of their actions begin to hit home, not only for their unthinking and selfish appropriation of someone else's work but also the dark and violent source of the Wallace family fortune. The narrative takes a surprising and dramatic turn by introducing the voice of the original songwriter. Is he a ghost playing out his revenge against the Wallaces? Is he merely a phantom of a tenuous grip on reality? It's by no means certain but his violent introduction is disorientating. It may have been better if the apparent lurch into the territory of magical realism had been integrated a little deeper into the novel but the uncertainty adds to the powerful sense of confusion as Seth's life and reality begin to collapse.

I picked up this new novel by Hari Kunzru believing I would read a Blues version of High Fidelity and soon realized it is something completely different. It surely deals with the power of music to transform lives, the collector’s obsessions and the love for a lost era (that is pre-war Mississippi Blues). But it also deals with race, class struggle, it condemns the immunity of the privileged and speaks up for the unprivileged ones. Because music was a one-way ticket for many black musicians, a way out of their misery, and you can clearly see it in the way Charlie Shaw fantasizes himself playing in Paris for the “royals”. Apart from that, this story is also a love story and a ghost story. I will agree with other reviewers that the second part is a bit blurry and the narrator is completely unreliable, but, I believe, this is part of his mental descent. Also, at some point I wasn’t even sure about the protagonist’s colour, which made me think “Why do we always assume our hero is white?”. Finally, there is a satisfying closure in the form of a nemesis, something I quite enjoyed.

This book also reminded me how much I enjoy reading Kunzru. I love his style, his choice of words, even his sometimes dramatic descriptions, his humorous conversations. This is a well-written and well-researched novel, if you are a music fan (any kind of music), you will surely appreciate it.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books (UK) and Hari Kunzru for providing a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is the first book of Kunzru's that I've read and I'm eager to read more of his work.

Music resonates with us all in different ways. But what if it goes further than that? What if music had a way to reach out and affect lives directly, manipulate people, change events? White Tears asks these questions in its tale of two friends who discover a piece of music which haunts them.
Ambitious, haunting and at times scary this is a tale which starts off at a crawl but quickly gathers momentum as we watch two friends from vastly different worlds come together. There is a morality tale at the core of this book but also a cynical view of how one cannot escape from a life of privilege. When things start to go wrong in the story then the book flounders slightly and the final third is a heady, confusing and ultimately troubling descent into darkness. Sometimes you don't know what is going on, this is almost certainly deliberate and when you reach the final pages you get clarity, but for some readers this may be too late.

I really enjoyed the book but found it equal parts enjoyable and frustrating. Its hung around with me after I have finished it and that's no bad thing. If the last third was just a little more straightforward in its narrative this would be a book I could truly love

On blurb of “White Tears” it describes Carter and Seth, the two main protagonists a being “two worlds apart” which way to capture the nature of this novel, the concept of being in a different world. It’s a perplexing novel about friendship with two friends in the music industry. The book is filled with white privilege and capturing an era of music, although describing era and time in this novel is a complex one as its never quite known when they are listening to is from and where they are? This sense of strangeness creates an unearthly feel to the book, one at times that is uneasy and for me something I could never quite grasp. Whist the writing was incredible insightful and equally sinister in the right moments I never quiet followed it down the ever-growing strange rabbit hole it crawled down in the second half of the novel. Whilst its strangeness it left me lost and distanced, making it a difficult and unmemorable read

This is a very complex novel which explores the roots of wealth in a classically WASP family in the US, via the interest of one family member in early African American music.

It is very much a novel of two halves, with a relatively straightforward, narrative opening and a more complex, rambling, stream-of- consciousness development.

Classic themes, for Kunzru, of isolation and exclusion are explored again, from an alternative perspective of a relatively ordinary individual struggling to fit into the alternative words of wealth, music collecting and music making. A challenging piece which is rewarding and worth the effort.

This is an inventive piece of writing that tackles questions of race both historically and in modern terms ('post-race'? Not in this book) through a prism of music - but not in any conventional or standard way. Kunzru takes his time to get to where he's going and I was a trifle impatient in the first half of the book though from the start the threads that will lead to the conclusion are laid out in an enticing way as our narrator records a voice that he shouldn't have been able to hear...

Taking in questions of the intersections between race, wealth and privilege, global capitalism and exploitation, and a shameful Black history that is rooted in the book in the US but which has parallels elsewhere, this is both hip and more expansively important. Kunzru's writing is not always the smoothest and there are some longueurs that we have to get through, but overall this is a book which tackles big questions in a creatively oblique way.

This book was a total mess. It's obvious the author has no emotional ties or connections or even understanding of record collecting, the blues, or history. The characters are so cringeworthy. Living in fear of that photo of you wearing a rasta beanie showing up on facebook. Ok. That's some real fear there bro.

White Tears is a literary horror story about music, race, and the hidden stories in America’s history. It starts off showing two music-obsessed friends, Seth and Carter, with Carter’s trust fund allowing them to delve into musical history and attempt to buy long forgotten records. This obsession with the past becomes something darker, something which defies conventional senses of past, present, and reality, until they are caught in a world without the freedom they are used to.

Kunzu’s novel begins slowly and initially feels like a story of rich and poor, a rich obsessive and his poorer friend, but abruptly turns into something much more interesting, the search for the origins of an elusive and unexpected track that seems to be haunting them. This track and other music and sounds are carefully written into the novel until it feels as if they are playing in the background as the characters are drawn deeper into a lost musical world that is deeply embedded in America’s past. It is not until later in the novel that it becomes apparent how Kunzru’s style and narrative have been setting up a chillingly inevitable dark world for the characters.

The combination of specific music recording terminology and a narrative that gradually erodes the difference of time means that the book may not appeal to everybody, but its transformation from a stereotypical New York opening to a ghost story about race and forgotten history is something to be experienced.