Campground
The lives of a group of people staying at a campground intersect in a shocking way
A campground is a public place where people from all walks of life come together – whether it be of their own volition or due to a twist of fate. Wortel uses this neutral territory to tell a story about happenstance, real human lives, and one ordinary guy who decides to commit mass murder.
In short chapters, Wortel introduces a range of different characters all of whom, sooner or later, find themselves in the same campground in the middle of the Netherlands. They have nothing to do with each other. In fact, some of them only make an appearance in a single chapter, never to be seen again. This ensemble cast creates suspense – what do these people have in common, apart from finding themselves in the same place at the same time?
The strength of this novel lies in its well-drawn characters. They each have something unique that endears them to the reader. Take Victorien, for example, who buys the campground after a bad breakup out of sheer spite, because it had been her ex’s dream to own a campground someday. Or Igor, a gentle, traumatized ex-marine. In one haunting flashback, we see him recovering the body of a beautiful, drowned boy who he is unable to get out of his mind afterward. And then there’s Dagmar, who writes newspaper reviews of plays she never attended.
These kinds of touching, humorous stories are a pleasure to read and stand in stark contrast to the harrowing end of the novel, when Igor decides to murder everyone at the campground – for no real reason. It’s a dark end to a witty book that even manages to make the reader feel empathy for the man committing this horrific act.
“Wortel’s prose is chewy and colloquial. Though her sentences are short, she knows how to take the reader by surprise with a joke or an idiosyncratic turn of phrase.”
“Campground is often witty. The portraits are as funny as they are empathetic. The narrator’s mildly sardonic voice sometimes verges on mocking but stops just short of being patronising or cynical. The characters are likable, chaotic and pitiable in equal measure.”
“Campground is the kind of book that I wanted to start all over again the moment I finished it.”
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