Rating: 
Summary: A warped mind with an extraordinary vocabulary
Review: If you want to brush up on obscure literary references and language, read this! Alchemey, poetry, goverment conspiracy, syphlis, it's all here. I felt claustrophobic reading this. That's skillfull atmosphere
Rating:
Summary: Big Ambitions, Partly Achieved
Review: It's evident that Disch set out with the goal in mind of writing a more "literary" sort of science fiction novel than was or is prevalent in the genre. He gets about 4/5s of the way there, actually.
Disch's verbal abilities and his mental dexterity are commendable, and are well displayed here. He is less successful at constructing plot intricacies, character development, and dramatic structure. Though it ties in with the plot, Disch's Pynchonesque linguistic display, which reaches a crescendo in the early part of Book Two, come off as the product of a young writer having fun with a highlighter and an unabridged OED. It's interesting that this novel was published about half a year after Daniel Keyes came out with a very similar book later adapted into a play and then a movie . The idea had been around since Keyes first wrote the novella version in 1959. The idea is basically the same. Scientists come up with a formula that makes brain processes accelerate, the subjects become brilliant for a while and then the unforeseen consequences set in. Charly returns to his mentally retarded state, Sacchetti lapses into the final stages of a degenerative disease (syphilis).Disch does introduce some interesting ideas along the way, however. The effect of syphilis, in particular,on the artistic mind, has long been a subject of conjecture. Though some arguments are a lot shakier (Beethoven) than others (de Mauppassant, Nietszche), the subject is definitely open to debate. Disch works such speculation into his story quite effectively. There is also the matter of the way in which the agent (The Palladine) is spread through the surface population (by sexual means) by a rebellious researcher. It does rather spookily prefigure the coming aids epidemic, and probably had some influence on later novelists such as Crichton and King. There is enough talent, brains and imagination on display here to appeal to "general" readers as well as Sci-Fi aficionados. It's at times intentionally obfuscating, but that's confined to a relatively brief section as the narrator undergoes a mental breakdown. The rest is highly readable. I will definitely seek out more works by the author.
Rating: 
Summary: THIS BOOK IS INTELLECTUAL SCI FI AT IT'S BEST
Review: Just finished this amazing novel. I'm making my way through Pringle's 100 Best Science Fiction Novels. So far, I've read 60 of them and this one is absolutely among the top 10. An incredibly layered, intellectual book. Make sure your dictionary is nearby for this read. It's a short book, but a slow read that packs so much thought, allegory and symbolism into so few pages. Yet Disch's style and characters keep the book entertaining. I expected nothing less than a fantastic, mind-blowing ending and that's what I got. I disagree with others who said they were disappointed. This book is the journal of an loftily intelligent man and only the most brilliant author could pull it off. Disch is nothing short of a genius--and he's writing horror now! Can't wait to read his horror, as well as 334 and "On the Wings of Song."
Rating:
Summary: Irony, Tragi-comedy, and poetry in motion
Review: Not a book for careless readers or those looking
for a quick fix of science fiction. This was Disch's 1st significant novel, and it appeared in 1969. The "endless" Vietnam War and a certain cynicism about government animates the book, but
it is essentially a story of a man who triumphs
in the face of disease, degradation, and official brutality.
The book is a tour de force of style. By turns acerbic, aphoristic, funny, and offbeat, the prose is packed with literary allusions to writers as diverse as Paul Valery, W. H. Auden, Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Rimbaud, and Rainer Marie Rilke. It's not devoid of a certain amount of excessive literary virtuosity, but all and all, Disch manages to carry it off well.
This isn't Disch's best novel. _On Wings of Song_ and _334_, to name two, are better. But this was a remarkable book for a young writer to have written. I'm still very fond of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Contemptible
Review: Sixties burnout pap. Sloppily written, confusing, obviously rushed into print. Could not finish it (read 2/3, the last 30 pages or so being a real chore). Why other reviewers like this dreadful misshpapen thing is utterly beyond me.
Rating:
Summary: Cognitive Noir
Review: The mouse Algernon, who taught us that genius is prone to accelerate death, that an advanced mind without advanced objects to focus its energies is rather like a dry wind blowing in the desert, a cancer perpetuating exploded copies of itself, has returned with a vengeance. His counterpart Charlie Gordon gave us a running commentary of what this might be like, surpassing all mentors, knowing everything at the loss of everything, haunted by the mongoloid imbecility of chromosomal deficit, a soul at zero. Charlie's fate suggests that "ignorance" (in controlled measures) may be a crucial survival trait to keep our Faustian species from tearing itself to pieces, but somehow we keep having to relearn this lesson in one brutal allegory after another. Thomas Disch works a less sentimental angle in *Camp Concentration*, where a test-pool of Army draft-dodgers are injected with Pallidine, a neuro-syphilis spirochete designed to maximize intelligence, with the obvious repercussion of encephalitic breakdown, the implosion of our "dumb-founded" procrustean brainpan (a cruel pun on Nietzsche's mental breakdown, the archetype of syphilitic genius). As brains commence with the systematic killing of brains (World War III), clinical psychology becomes the new Inquisition, and Disch provides an interesting thesis on the lengths Genius will go to survive and prosper within the prognathous clockwork of the State (in this novel, an excursion into alchemical black magick). Alchemy becomes the "mad song" of desperate rebellion against the Camp's collective "countdown to extinction," the warehousing of would-be super-soldiers who've abandoned military science to wage war on the Faustian inner self. "It begins to accomplish, in fact, what was at first expected of it -- those various researches into the Apocalypse that we call 'pure research'"(126). And even more to the point: "The poison [Pallidine] has had not two effects -- genius and death -- but one. Call it by which name you will"(184). Hence Valery's thesis that the mind at the end of its tether achieves the supreme poverty of being "a force without an object," and the aesthetic success of Disch's novel will veer on how interestingly this big chill will push the reader to question his own preconceptions of what intelligence "really is," of what the human mind *in extremis* is really worth. Written in the same dark period as J. G. Ballard's *The Atrocity Exhibition*(1967-68), Disch's novel is part of that "new wave" of texts that upped the ante for SF authorship forever, introducing a level of maturity and literary prowess largely unknown to the genre during the Vietnam years. The journal format frees Disch to write in a haphazard, epigrammatic, undisciplined manner, glimmers of brilliant and penetrating prose at the expense of narrative momentum. The book moves in jumps and starts, the incremental genius of the narrator limited only by Disch's own imaginative and conceptual shortcomings. It would appear that a 1st-person representation of virtuosity would have to be rendered by a true virtuoso, but in *Camp Concentration* Disch is merely brilliant, not a Proust or a Kafka, not someone who can see truly into the heart of Gnostic apotheosis, then discover language to convey its transient, uncapturable, ever-fleeting nature. Disch takes the low road of dramatizing precocity along the lines of drunkenness, hysteria, morbidity, ennui, egomania, a string of Faustian banalities. His narrator Sachetti becomes a "genius" only to sink deeper into a gray, monochrome, rather shiftless sort of damnation, with only a smattering of muddled platitudes and allusive epigrams to give back to the reader. Still, *Camp Concentration* deftly allegorizes the "fetishization" of intelligence by a society that designs its schools and institutions to stifle, derange, and humiliate the mind's more radical manifestations -- that genius and HIQ, however openly praised and valorized, are just as often dismissed as an *unusable* aberrance, non-industrial and thus invisible, left to fester and die alone (unless it be the "genius" to become a dot.com millionaire, or a Machiavellian statesman, or a synthetic media icon, or a patent-producing scientist/engineer, or a high-level government bureaucrat, or a Nobel Prize-winning sentimental hack novelist). From an evolutionary standpoint, the ability to "see everything" on a planet so limited in its passions and in its possibilities is rather like a "suicide kit" for the Gnostic inner self -- though here I may only be betraying my own lack of intellectual cunning, my own failure to conceptualize Genius along life-affirming, apotropaic lines (this was Nietzsche's project, after all). Disch's novel, for all its dead spots and conceptual confusion, still provides at least a dozen scenarios in its prolix pages for heated discussion and debate, testing Valery's thesis that SUPREME GENIUS IS THE ABILITY TO LEAVE ONE'S SPECIES BEHIND FOREVER, to become incurably Other, "homo faustus" at the ends of the earth. Enjoy, you sick puppies.
Rating: 
Summary: More of a philosophical exercise than entertainment
Review: There can be little doubt that Disch, like the protagonist in the story, is an intelligent man (or at the very least, a well read one). Camp Concentration is crammed full of obscure literary allusions and quotes in Latin and various other languages. These references may be easily recognizable to Lit and Philosophy majors, but most people will probably not get them.
The plot of Camp Concentration is similar to Flowers for Algernon, but instead of creating a genius from a simpleton, the story begins with the main character, Louis Sacchetti, being a troubled, highly intellectual poet with an IQ of 160. I did not like Sacchetti and found it hard to sympathise with his character. The entire book is written in the form of this man's journal and his intellectual elitism and condescension is apparent in most of what he writes, especially in comments about his fellow prisoners. I felt it odd that he only mentions his friends and family outside a few times with no thought or concern about what has become of them. Maybe the author intended to portray Sacchetti as an unlikeable person, an outcast, but, unfortunately, that also kept me from really caring about what happened to him.
The plot itself holds few surprises, save at the end, but even these were nothing that has not been done many times over in science fiction. Sacchetti seems to grow more physcologically unbalanced as the disease progresses, and the references become even more obscure as his journal becomes mostly strange conversations with fellow prisoners and his own thoughts about intellegence, the existence of God, etc. At times, it seemed more like homework for a modern philosophy class. It did succeed in making me think though, so I have to give the book credit and say that, as a philosophical exercise, it was fairly successful.
To sum it up, the plot was too bland for me to recommend as even "smart" entertaiment, but if you can wade through the obscure references and want to think deep thoughts like Louis Sacchetti, then Camp Concentration is for you.
Rating:
Summary: One of the ten best sf novels ever
Review: There's not much to add to everyone else's praise. This is way up there at the top of the top ten and anybody who claims to like adult science fiction -- or good contemporary fiction for that matter --can't claim themselves educated until they've read it! 334 and Wings of Song are great, too. In fact 334 would probably also be in that top ten, too.
Rating:
Summary: The Dark Side of Grey Matter
Review: This book appears on most of the 'best of' science fiction lists that various pundits and critics have put out, even though it is not a very commonly known work. Does it deserve such a placing? I think the answer to that depends upon what your viewpoint is about what science fiction, as a form of literature, is supposed to accomplish. The idea is simple enough. A new drug, developed from the bacteria that causes syphilis, is found to have the property of greatly increasing a person's intelligence, but with major side effect - it kills the user in about nine months. The story follows one Louis Sacchetti, a conscientious objector to a seemingly interminable war, and who would already be considered to be a genius by most standards, as he is transferred from a standard prison to a facility specially constructed to see what will happen to its inmates when given this drug. The story is told through the means of a journal that Louis is encouraged, almost forced, to keep. As this idea is extremely similar to that of Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon (which was later made into the movie Charly), comparison is invited. Flowers emphasizes the tragedy of the hero, a man who struggles to find those bits of knowledge that will help not just himself but all mankind, up against an unbeatable problem, that of his own death. Camp Concentration follows a completely different path, that of the essential selfishness of the individual, of nihilism, of the despair of ever being able to change humanity in any meaningful way. The inmates that Louis initially documents are apparently using their greatly enhanced intelligence to investigate alchemy as a means of providing immortality, not for humanity in general, but for themselves and the 'warden' of this prison, Humphrey Haast. Louis, meanwhile, seems caught up in crafting new poems and a play, entitled 'Auswitch, A Comedy'. The title is indicative of something Disch does throughout this book, playing with names and titles to produce another layer of meaning behind the straightforward words, and is fairly effective in doing so. The tone is the primary thing here, a very dark, brooding atmosphere, enlivened by a very wide ranging vocabulary and many references, both buried and open, to other works of literature (most especially Dante), and scientific and psychological theories. Readers who are not familiar with these references may feel a little lost at places in this book - at least I did, as my breadth of knowledge in these areas is clearly more limited than Disch's. But from this tone, Disch develops his themes of the corruption of man, of his baser desires, the absolute horrors of what man is capable of, and where such capacity leads. As such, this book is almost the complete antithesis of Flowers for Algernon - that is, until the ending of this book. The ending of this book, I felt, rather drastically detracted from its overall message, as it doesn't seem to fit with the rest, and has a little of a deus-ex-machina feel to it. Given the many layered discourse that Disch presented in the rest of the book, which while sometimes difficult to follow, was certainly excellent writing, this ending was a disappointment. While this is certainly a major entry into the dystopian side of science fiction literature, whether it truly qualifies as a 'classic' will be, I'm afraid, very much a matter of opinion for a long time to come. But it is certainly worth reading, if for nothing else than to see the darker side of genius competently presented. --- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
Rating:
Summary: Not for everybody--which does not mean "not for you"
Review: This is a masterpiece of the SF of the 60s which has aged quite well. I read it in the early 90s, and it was still an impressive and powerful book. I found it terrifying and desperate, and totally absorbing, even though the main character is not totally sympathetic. It doesn't matter if you have a PhD or not; what it matters is if you are able to sympathize with somebody who is suffering. Empathy, as Philip K. Dick, another gifted SF writer (greatly admired by Disch), would call it. Disch's characters are never flat or unconvincing. They talk, behave, look and smell like real people. This is a typical gift of the classical novelist, and Disch is one of them. Sacchetti, who probably is a snob (and I understand that Disch wanted him to be one), is nonetheless the victim of a dishuman system. One should not get confused by Camp Concentration being a rewriting of Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. In that novel nobody is to blame for what happens. Here things are totally different. This is also a strong and corrosive political novel. There are characters who are answerable for what happens in the underground camp--and that looks like a political question to me. It is also a rewriting of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus--those who were so displeased with literary references might discover that you only need to read that novel to grasp everything which may seem obscure or difficult in Disch's book. And that is not such a big effort--provided you like classical music a lot.
|
