495 of 523 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sade's Masterpiece, February 3, 2001
This review is from: The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings (Paperback)
I wanted to contribute a review to correct some of the impressions readers may have gotten from other customers' reviews of 120 Days of Sodom. First of all, I do regard 120 Days as a masterpiece -- Sade's only masterpiece, and a dazzling contribution to world literature. I will spend the rest of this review hopefully providing 120 Day's future readers some keys to appreciate this mammoth, peculiar novel.
120 days is shocking, horrifying -- disgusting. This is pretty well universally agreed upon. This in itself says quite a lot. We live in a world where "shocking" has lost much of its meaning. Yet the Marquis De Sade continues to shock our jaded, supposedly unshockable sensibilities; if we want to read this book well, it's worth asking ourselves why. As Simone De Beauvoir says in her introduction to this edition, Sade was a good novelist -- and a great moralist.
One thing Sade definitely was not was a proselytizer for sexual freedom. The recent move "Quills" -- while not completely misleading on this point -- was still much too frivolous, too much of a French sex comedy ( and also too traditionally heterosexual ) to reflect the Sadean universe. Sade is not Henry Miller; with him, sexual freedom is not an issue. Power is. The powerful are sexually free. Sex interests Sade far less than pleasure, and pleasure for Sade can't exist without squashing the weak. An exemplar of the Sadean universe might be the Michael Douglass character from "Wall Street" except that now he knows that sex, even above money, is the ultimate fantasy thrill of power.
In other words, they coined the word "sadism" after him for good reasons! 120 Days is not only the story of four men who act out their sick, abusive fantasies, but of four men who employ storytellers to "entertain" them -- with stories describing every sexual variation conceivable. The stories are valued by the degree to which they explore the relationship between sexuality and crime.
The curiosity is that, although his books disgust us -- particularly when we first start to read --Sade isn't particularly graphic. I can think of books with incomparably more explicit depictions of sex and violence -- for example "American Psycho". The difference is that in books like "American Psycho" or films like "Kids" the corruption is viewed from a distance; the author doesn't approve of what happens, he merely "shows it like it is." This is not Sade's attitude at all. He is a cheerleader for the horrors and excesses of vice.
I read a review recently that compared Sade to rap music. The reviewer jokingly insinuated that Sade was the eighteenth century equivalent of Ice-T. This, too, is untrue. Rap music generally makes a rather moral case. Rap artists posture to their audience as members of an underprivileged society who justify their misogamy/criminality by denouncing the brutal conditions imposed upon them. Sade justifies his cruelty by invoking Nature -- nature made me this way.
Moreover, if you look at how the world works, you will see that nature sides with the powerful. Nature encourages us to satisfy ourselves by stepping on others. This is what Sade says. In short, 120 Days isn't just a succession of shocking scenes, which many contemporary books are -- it is an intellectual justification of a philosophy of vice. Be prepared.
"That which does not kill us makes us stronger," said Nietzsche. I lastly want to emphasize why I believe a book like 120 Days has a positive value. I know this sounds strange -- particularly before you have experienced the sweeping lyricism, the ferocity of Sade's prose, the intensity of his passions, the obstinacy of a vision that few adults could sustain, and a rare children articulate -- but I believe it. Sade makes the best case that has yet been given for cruelty, if you will, evil. If his arguments weren't skillful, 120 Days would be an exercise in futility. Sade is like a nasty child, who miraculously possesses the intellect as well as the shamelessness to defend his behavior rationally.
Sade succeeds as an artist if his vision strikes us as sensible within its own terms, as bizarrely accurate, or at least well-observed. He tempts us toward the abyss of cynicism. Yet for me personally reading 120 Days was a liberating and even religious experience. It was like having my worst fears articulated -- and there was a sense of liberation in the aftermath of that.
Sade has done humanity a favor by visualizing hell. In a bizarre way, by describing the worst we could perpetuate, he also gives us a vision of the divine we cannot live up to. If you take 120 Days and invert it, you would have a vision of heaven, the divine in ourselves we believe in solely by faith -- but which escapes the capacities of words. Sade truly writes with an uncanny purity; of absolutes, absolute evil and, by implication, of innocence.This is why he is so often referred to as the Divine Marquis.
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44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Everyone seems to gloss over..., September 28, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings (Paperback)
...the unique linguistic structure of this book. As legend has it, Sade wrote the entire novel on both sides of a huge roll of paper while imprionsed in the Bastille. Beginning it in the overwrought prose style common to his era and milieu, the Marquis found himself filling up paper more quickly than the plot was developing. Therefore -- as the "Passions" of the book's four main sections become increasingly more perverse and "sadistic" (there really oughta be a different word), the writing style begions to pare itself down in inverse proportion. By the end of the book, he has even abandoned basic sentence and paragraph structure, and simply lists what each day's increasingly vile atrocities are.
The strange effect inherent in all this is that as the reader reads on, he/she gradually takes over for Sade, supplying all the things which Sade leaves out, verbs and settings and dialogue and description. In the end, the reader has completely assumed the writer's job. Who, then, is guiltier of summoning such demons from the imagination -- the reader or the Marquis?
In it's own way (whether Sade consciously intended it or really did write the book that way because of lack of paper) "The 120 Days of Sodom" presents a trap as confounding as Blackbeard's feat of natural engineering on Oak Island.
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53 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Decent De Sade, January 20, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings (Paperback)
The 120 Days of Sodom is probably the worst book I have read by the Marquis de Sade. This is probably a great compliment to him as a writer because the book is still very good.
The 120 Days is the book that is usually known as De Sade's masterpiece, although he personally preffered Justine, a better story. Anyway, the story is simple. Several wealthy libertines take a retreat to a secret castle to engage in sinister acts. There victims are specially chosen people who suit their particular tastes and in most cases have been abducted to get there.
The story takes place over 30 days in which the libertines engage in every sexual indecency you can think of. The punishments for those who are do not perform adaquatly are violent and cruel and the book could easily be the most evil story ever conceived.
This should not be a deterrant for any mature reader. Those who want to spite De Sade will have an easy time taking shots at the sexual superficialities of the book. Anyone who tries to read and understand the book will discover it to be rich in ingenius philisophical ideas.
The 120 Days is, admittedly, an arduous task to get through and is not De Sade's best work. The story unfortunatly is predictable juggling sexual escapades with philisophical matters.
De Sade's best work remains Eugenie de Franvale, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Justine.
The short work in this book entitled Florville de Courval is the best part of the collection and makes the book worth buying instantly. It tells the tale of a poor women who's life has been plagued by misfortune, a theme dealt with in Justine. Her misfortunes accumulate at the ending into the ultimate in ironic finales. The story is only 75 pages long but is brilliant in every sense.
De Sade is a great, if not misunderstood writer. The quality of the language and the conviction of his philosophies prove that to anyone who has ever dared to honestly read one of his books.
Do not be afraid of the man's reputation. He is a smart man and if you give the guy the chance he'll prove it.
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