Guardian Newspaper 1000 Novels discussion

In February we will be reading Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch for our Sci-Fi & Fantasy category - who's in?

I need to track down a copy from the library but I plan to read it this month.

This is short enough I might be able to squeeze it in. It's now added to the pile, anyway

Added this to my enormous TBR so I’m in.

Long the underdog. Now the champion!
And maybe.. more timely than ever?
(I don't really know what it's about, tbh..)

Christopher wrote: "Long the underdog. Now the champion!
And maybe.. more timely than ever?
(I don't really know what it's about, tbh..)"

Here's the second book I've agitated for for a while that finally gets its due. Now if I can ever get anyone else to vote for Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak, I'll have the trifecta. (Though I suppose they'll all come round, sooner or later)

Hope this one is as good as Friends of Eddie Coyle

I’m finding sections of this book unbearably pretentious, in that late-60s upstairs studio-theatre college-production way.

Uh-oh. That doesn't sound promising. Since it's such a short book, any section with that would be too much.

It's CAMP. Put your kaleidoscopic specs on.

Hey - it’s a reread for me. The “pretentious” is key to the “twist” at the end (which is very clear from about a quarter of the way through and not very twist like). It is a good read but I struggled with the fact that it was so similar to other plots I had read. I had to keep reminding myself that this came first and the others copied this.

Okay - I’ll wait until I reach the twist and hold judgement (and hope it’s not what I think it’s going to be).

Finished it last night. Have to say that I wasn’t that impressed. Sorry. Louie is an unlikeable narrator and what I thought as pretentious earlier, in the end had nothing to do with the denouement. The discussions on alchemy felt interminable (I’ve had more than enough of that from Balzac, thank you very much).

The twist ending was a good one, however, and one I wasn’t expecting, so good star for that. However, if this is an intellectual classic of the genre, I reckon that bar must be a lot lower in genre fiction than it is in general fiction and I must prefer my SF less intellectual.

I am a quarter way through, and really like it so far.
The pretentiousness is all a send up, of course. It reminds me of Enoch Soames: a memory of the eighteen-nineties, if you've ever had the pleasure.

I can't guess the twist unless- dun dun duh- they're all DEAD.
That quote about Hugo van Goes and the pineal gland might be a clue.

So, I just got that 'conchies' are conscientious objectors.

That may be WW I or WW II slang. I don't know if CO status got you interned at either time.

(I have a friend who would probably know...)

OK, midway through, I was prepared to give this five stars if it stuck the landing, as it were, but, no, not quite five stars from me, although I did enjoy it.

At the same time, it is palpably a coterie novel, maybe even more than it is SF.

I actually liked the alchemy. Reminded me a little of Rene Guenon, although he cites another Rene.

René Guénon

I recently watched the Richard Burton Doctor Faustus, and maybe Disch had recently watched it, too, since it is contemporary. (Mid sixties)- although I don't think it was particularly campy.

Errr...



Anyway, I did not guess the twist. I would have been more prepared for a 'sentient virus' twist, but I wasn't impressed with what Disch dished, and I don't think he was the first. In fact, yeah, I might have seen it coming, if I hadn't been on the lookout for something else.
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So, has anybody else read it? I'm really glad it won this month.

I wish I had read this as a teenager in the 1970's. I would have been impressed, and educated. As it is, though I admire the book, I don't see why it has become a classic, and I can't decide whether it's the main character whose viewpoint I dislike, or the author's.

So I finally started this (yay me!). So far I feel like I'm with Phil--the writing is not wowing me so far...it feels like it's trying to hard or something. Anyway--I'll probably finish tonight or early tomorrow, so maybe I'll have a different opinion by then

I wrote a long post about this this morning, but I ran out of signal and lost it. I thought GR kept drafts of comments too, but I guess just reviews.

Anyway--

The ending surprised me--I did not see it coming at all, and that was with already knowing there was a twist. Usually, if I know that there's a twist, half my attention is bent on trying to outthink the author. So good on him for that, I suppose.

There are some books I read where something the author writes makes me lose my suspension of disbelief--rather than becoming engrossed in the story or the characters, I feel the author lurking over my shoulder. Like in the Bosch books by Connelly--there's these references to jazz musicians that feel out of place to me, as if Connelly just wants to put those references in there because he likes that music. I don't know precisely what it was the Disch did to make me lose involvement, but it seemed like there were a lot of references to things that were there more for Disch to display things he thought were cool than that were necessary for the plot.

The rambling middle section was bad about that--and I know I didn't even get all the references. In a way, I felt like Disch was saying 'I know this and I know this and this too and...' Of course, the fewer references that I got, the more annoying this was, so that's on me. Had I taken more time with it, I might have traced out some of his Thomist arguments, but I had never really gotten invested in the story at the beginning, so I picked up what I could and didn't really bother about the rest.

As I said, the ending surprised me, so I can bump it up some for that. Overall, the book was not at all what I was expecting, and that could very well have heightened my disappointment. The book was or tried to be much more philosophical than I was prepared for--had I known that going in, I might have ramped up my attention in the beginning. Instead, I think I had expected something pretty straightforward--I think one of the edition's covers made me think it was going to be some kind of dystopian pre-Road Warrior story. If the right circumstances came about, I'd probably give Disch another try, with a different mindset going in.

I respected Disch as the author of The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters and The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, but I only became interested in his SF because Barry Malzberg cited it among a very few SF authors who had written science fiction as literature and not pulp, which sounds like Malzberg is a snob, I don't know. Don't quote me.

As I understand it, the respect was not mutual. Disch thought Malzberg wrote too much too fast.

Again, the pretentiousness or the obscurity, some of which may be in-jokes, are because this is coterie fiction in the guise of SF. I consider it more akin to Pictures from an Institution or Seven Men and Two Others than to (God forbid) Alas, Babylon, or something like that.

I agree about the "rambling middle section"
I read this a while back and to summarise my 4 star review, I said it was a book of "three thirds", with an intriguing start/set-up and an excellent ending, but marked it down for the dodgy middle!

(oh and I (rather belatedly, sorry!) linked this thread to the actual book, so that we can all see each others ratings/status for the book - you can click on anybody's rating and go straight through to their review)

I didn't know what coterie fiction was, so I looked it up. The very fact that I didn't know what that meant probably excludes me from a lot of it.

Looking over a few of the examples the article I was reading provided, I realized that most of that kind of thing hasn't really appealed to me in the past. Probably because a lot of it is over my head--but surely some of the enjoyment of reading this kind of stuff is the enjoyment of recognizing obscure references as much as how those obscure references further the plot or the theme of the book. Again, that's kind of on me--when I can sense that an author is talking over my head, there's quite a bit less enjoyment for me, which is why I never really felt invested in this one, I think.

Well, too bad. I think I agree with others about the 'middle section,' the part of the diary where Louie is pretty out of it. And the 'short story' about the guy, the plot to kill his wife (I forget his name). What was that? SF novels are notoriously padded, but Camp Concentration isn't even that long.