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3.71 AVERAGE
3.71 AVERAGE
I had a hard time shelving this book into any of my shelves. It is a novel that takes place in America, and is steeped in American issues, but was written by a British novelist of English and Kashmiri origin. At first it's a ghost story centering around a frankly pathetic hanger-on named Seth and his rich friends in New York, then glancingly a murder mystery, then slowly a story of a descent into madness, and suddenly becomes a story of racialized oppression and violence in the American South. Kunzru unmoors his narrative from genre, the story slipping from one type to another, until the true story under all the stories is unearthed from a muddy Mississippi levee. Throughout, Kunzru is picking apart issues of race as it applies to art and authenticity. For Seth and his friends, what does it mean to be a white collector and connoisseur of the Blues, music that is such a piercing chronicle of Black pain? For those whose appreciation is a shallow thing, it could be seen as a morality tale, or a warning. You never know what kind of ghosts haunt a work of art, or what kind of revenge those ghosts might be seeking for long-buried sins.
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
3.5. I didn’t love reading this. I was often confused. But I thought a lot about this book and what it meant, which means something to me.
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Starts off pretty lights, get so dark, so fast. Very revenge-porny but, as someone who really enjoys Tarantino movies, that’s not a criticism from me.
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
4.5 but rounding up. This had me hooked at the start because I loved how detailed the MC went into music production, records, history etc - while I didn’t get all the references it gave me flashbacks to when I was deep into the same topic. I appreciated the detail, the amount of research and detail needed to make that world real.
I then related to the MC’s aimlessness, and how easily he gets swept up in the first person who seems to share his passions. But then the book starts to morph into something far more meaningful and layered.
The relationship between the MC and his rich best friend. That build up of resentment but also dependability.
Then the horror-esque undertones as things unravel. Often you can’t tell if certain things are happening or if it’s hallucinations.
Then we get to the meat in the last 100 pages. The privilege of the main cast of characters to joyride into a culture, when their privilege is built on institutionalised racism.
You feel all of that throughout but can’t quite put the pieces together and then everything slots dramatically together in the last act.
I then related to the MC’s aimlessness, and how easily he gets swept up in the first person who seems to share his passions. But then the book starts to morph into something far more meaningful and layered.
The relationship between the MC and his rich best friend. That build up of resentment but also dependability.
Then the horror-esque undertones as things unravel. Often you can’t tell if certain things are happening or if it’s hallucinations.
Then we get to the meat in the last 100 pages. The privilege of the main cast of characters to joyride into a culture, when their privilege is built on institutionalised racism.
You feel all of that throughout but can’t quite put the pieces together and then everything slots dramatically together in the last act.
This book about awful rich white hipsters in Brooklyn (sound wearingly familiar?) becomes all the more impressive and confounding when you learn it’s written by an Indian-British man in his 40s, assuming a virtuosic and anthropological voice for a subculture that never seems to use its artistic platform for self-awareness. Instead of the Bushwick rich kid being the status quo for the universal American experience, Kunzru does something a lot weirder here, reaching well beyond class satire into psychedelic horror. As you make your way through a story about hipster DJs using blues music in their productions, the narrative quickly melts into magical realism and the supernatural, almost by way of Toni Morrison’s slavery ghost story in Beloved. What begins as a broad satire of hipster taste and cultural appropriation becomes a harrowing deposition on the soul of white America — cultural exploitation, in Kunzru’s mind, has much to do with the exploitation of black bodies throughout American history. A truly original, weird, and horrifying book.
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes