Camp Concentration
★★★★★
Somewhere under the desert lies Camp Archimedes, a government institute populated with convicts and deserters. Infected by Pallidine, a strain of syphilis that bestows genius, they’re paying a terrible price for transcendence.
“Truly, the world is ending. Not by ice and not by fire, but by centrifugal force.”
We experience the camp through Sacchetti’s journal, a voluble poet and conscientious objector tasked with documenting the inmates’ imposed Faustian bargain. As the narrative unfolds, Disch marshals prose as a plot device, aggressively ramping its density in a lexiphanic orgy of obscure vocabulary. I soon tired of looking up words and literary allusions – the purple prose was technically impressive, but draining, and made a short book surprisingly slow going.
Sacchetti is an uninviting cerebral intellectual, his emotional detachment amplified by Disch’s choice of epistolary form. It’s a format I dislike, but as with Flowers for Algernon, it works well for an interior arc. Disch argues for an inverse correlation between intelligence and humanity, exploring the fine line between genius and madness in the tradition of New Wave’s interiority obsession. In this light, Sacchetti’s coldness isn’t a failure of execution; it’s a thematic choice.
The quiet acceptance of the inmates evokes the tragic bureaucratic horror of the concentration camp, the asylum, the Stanford prison, Milgram’s electrocutions. It’s a study of the terrible things people do as part of a system. Every character’s humanity, whether a jailor or jailed, is shredded by the situation, their freedom curtailed. The unthinkable becomes quotidian.
Religious allegory suffuses the narrative — Pallidine as forbidden knowledge, the enlightened as martyrs, transcendence as salvation and damnation. Yet the ending still caught me by surprise. I was expecting an echo of Russ’ We Who Are About To, but instead got a genre-pleasing deus ex machina crossed with heavy-handed religious symbolism – an unwelcome betrayal of a hard-fought polemic. It’s a book that will stay with me; I’m glad I read it and glad I’m finished with it.
