White Tears
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: April 24, 2017 1:28 PM | Last Updated: December 20, 2017
Hari Kunzru
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. (From Knopf)
From the book
That summer I would ride my bike over the bridge, lock it up in front of one of the bars on Orchard Street and drift through the city on foot, recording. People and places. Sidewalk smokers, lover's quarrels, drug deals. I wanted to store the world and play it back just as I'd found it, without change or addition. I collected audio of thunderstorms, music coming out of cars, the subway trains rumbling underfoot; it was all reality, a quality I had lately begun to crave, as if I were deficient in some necessary vitamin or mineral. I had a binaural setup, two little mics in my ears that looked like headphones, a portable recorder clipped to my belt under my shirt. It was discreet. No one ever noticed. I could roam where I liked and then ride home and listen back through Carter's thousand-dollar headphones at the studio. There were always phenomena I hadn't registered, pockets of sound I'd moved through without knowing.
From White Tears by Hari Kunzru ©2006. Published by Knopf.