RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...a ghost story about the vengeful spirit of a dead bluesman … Kunzru’s conceit — a vengeful recording — interrogates the complex racial politics of the consumption and collection of blues music by white listeners … Kunzru weaponizes the figure of the ghosted blues musician, reconfiguring the insubstantiality of the revenant Shaw as a relentless, brutal haunting...Shaw’s vengeful reappearance is the expression of a desire for others to finger the jagged grain of his life, to force those who would invoke his name to experience those historical injustices visited upon African Americans not as some abstract image of suffering, but as real-world agony and fury.
