N. J. Campbell

I enjoyed Found Audio for the most part; it's a tightly written, mildly metafictional narrative about a man's growing obsession with the otherworldly and unknowable--and, it's suggested in the brief, two-layered frame narrative, others' obsession with his record of it. It's a bit like a House of Leaves for busy people who also could do with a little less formal experimentation. Unfortunately, it's also the second book I've read lately that needed more editing than it got (the other being Jade City, which is otherwise nothing like this book). In the case of Found Audio, this did not result in any large-scale structural problems, but like Jade City, it struggles a little with finding the word that it actually wants. Granted, confusing "tenants" and "tenets" is such a common error that "tenet" is probably going to end up as a secondary definition of "tenant" in the dictionary sooner or later, but it's still jarring to see in a published book. Also--much like Jade City's "sated but not quenched" line--the protagonist's desire for experiences outside the normal human range is at one point "if not stopped, at least stanched." The book also at one point translates "よろしくお願いします" in a really baffling way--it notes, correctly, that it is a hard phrase to translate out of context, but "favorably of course, with the hope that we can turn it to our advantage" (paraphrased from memory) is really not a possible meaning. (It literally translates to "please treat me kindly" and is primarily used as a stock phrase when introducing oneself, particularly in a work setting.) Maybe the frame-narrative translator's work is supposed to be suspect, but if so the book could have done a better job at hinting that her basic understanding of the language, rather than simply her ability to translate phrases out of context, is in question.

This is all a lot of nitpicking of a book I mostly enjoyed, and since Found Audio was published by a small press, it's understandable if they don't have the resources to do a very stringent editing job. But as I mentioned in my Jade City review, I really do find these things distracting, and that's particularly a shame with Found Audio because it's otherwise the kind of book you could get really engrossed in and read in one sitting and put down feeling slightly disoriented, and tripping over stuff like that detracts from the experience.… (més)

One of the lines that made me laugh was "I paid her $88 tab consisting mostly of gin and egg salad sandwiches" — which I read while eating an egg salad sandwich (no gin), sitting in the courtyard of my office on a sweltering day, about to make a huge career transition. A preoccupation of the book is the search for odd things and the attempt to understand them, and I thought about how transitions are odd things — times when out-of-the-ordinary experiences become commonplace, at least until you settle into a new routine.

Dreams are another preoccupation of the book. At one point, the narrator admits that during a period following an inexplicable experience, he had no dreams. Perhaps he suppressed them because he wanted to live a normal, explicable life. I go months without recalling any dreams — perhaps I too reject them because they're illogical. But while I was in the middle of the book's Tape III, I remembered a dream I'd had: I was in a horse-drawn wagon for hours, traveling east on a busy highway through Iowa; when we stopped for something to eat, the convenience store had only energy drinks and cigarettes, and I said, "There's nothing for me here." It pretty clearly represented my career change.

Anyway, aside from those coincidences, I really enjoyed the clever construction of the book, the epistolary — or transcriptional? — format, the character of A.A. Singh and her obscure, expert footnotes, and the author as narrator, who claims, "I have gone with the current publisher because they have agreed to let me assert in this afterword that the account is, in fact, non-fiction, even if, for legal reasons, it must be published as fiction."

If that quote intrigues you, or if the following one piques your interest, I think you'll enjoy Found Audio.

"I understood, for the first time, how I could never, ever understand — how it was impossible, actually, to explain how any part of life could be seen as more than an unexplainable dream — how the events of being awake proceeded and were as strange and marvelous as any of the miracles that occur when we are asleep."… (més)

Presented as a transcription of tape recordings found in a Buenos Aires library, Found Audio reads as a series of dream-visions that bemuse both narrator and reader. That we are transported to no place in particular seems to be the point.

‘The thing you are most afraid of,’ he said in his thick Eastern European accent, ‘is that there may be more and less to this world than there seems to be.’ He went on by saying that this world—this whole world—could be as strange and wonderful and fantastic and unknowable as this dream or any other.
That all of this—everything—is an odd thing beyond explanation entirely.… (més)