Found Audio

April 10, 2017
In his debut, Campbell has written a page-turner, an onion peel of a story surrounding nothing less than the central questions of human existence. The first layer is author Campbell’s claim to have come upon a manuscript. The second layer consists of documents accompanying this manuscript, written in haste by an audio analyst named Amrapali Anna Singh, who claims a man arrived in her office in Alaska, bringing with him important audio recordings from Buenos Aires, and offered her a very large amount of money to analyze them. The core of the book is Singh’s transcription of the recordings themselves, in which an intrepid unnamed journalist recounts a series of strange and dangerous journeys upon which he embarks in search of people and ideas that are greater than the sum of their parts. In the first tape the journalist describes a trip to the Louisiana bayou in search of a man named Otha Johnson, a legendary bounty hunter of snakes. In the second, the journalist travels to the walled city of Kowloon, a remote village in South Africa, and finally to the Mongolian desert in search of “the City of Dreams,” mentioned throughout history by the likes of Napoleon and Cortez. It is unclear and unsettling to both the journalist and the reader whether the journalist’s experiences are real or hallucinated. In the final tape, the journalist meets “the Turk,” a chess-playing shaman who thereafter appears in the journalist’s dreams, promising to reveal “that there may be more and less to this world than there seems to be.” The reader is led down a rabbit hole and back out again, confused, afraid, but nevertheless also ever so slightly amused. This is a weird little book full of momentum, intrigue, and weighty ideas to mull over.

May 1, 2017
A mysterious manuscript tells the story of one man's plunge into the abyss.To quote Winston Churchill, welcome to a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Campbell offers a wicked metafictional mystery in this slim but artful debut novel. Try to follow along. In an introduction, the author says he received the mysterious manuscript, containing transcripts of three cassette tapes, in 2006. The tapes had been transcribed by Amrapali Anna Singh, a professor of archival studies in Alaska, at the request of a man named Pierre Cavey, who had very nearly circled the world to bring her the tapes, marked with the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires. Then we get to the tapes themselves, which chronicle the journey of an unnamed American journalist. The first depicts a hallucinatory voyage into the bayou on a snake-hunting expedition. The second reveals a little more. A friend of the journalist explains that his search for meaning in the world is a search for "The City of Dreams"--a myth that connects dreams to a place from various historical sources, with examples from Cortes to Dr. Livingstone's ill-fated voyage. "The point is, it's a myth--a mirage in the margins of conjecture and hearsay," the narrator is told. And indeed, the narrator becomes obsessed with finding the mysterious destination, traveling from Kowloon to Mongolia. Finally, in the third tape, the narrator travels to Istanbul to meet "The Turk," a mysterious chess champion who has more questions than answers. "You have gone around the world collecting the most odd of odd things--experiences of a fantastic order...in a swamp with an old man, in a desert filled with tents and in the belly of a fallen city," says the Turk. "Tell me, are you chasing your dreams?" Campbell's afterword offers little explanation other than his abortive attempts to find out the identity of the narrator, but the experience of reading the book remains arresting. A dizzying epistolary novel about dreams, perception, and the human psyche.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.