Customer Reviews

The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

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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.

...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.

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.

I haven't read this book since the first time more than twenty years ago - and it was damned hard to get hold of then. Never had I thought at the time of reading that even someone with the reputation of de Sade could construct something with such a force of indifferent cruelty and total absence of any sort of moral restriction. The 'buggers' in it particularly fascinated me - their explicit orders as to mode of dress(!) and daily, er, functions literally burned themselves into my memory. Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm no S/M adherent, but the way de Sade wrote this, the descent (ascent?) into ritualised debauchery and sexually taboo areas becomes hypnotic and, as has been mentioned, almost a 'shopping list' of the day's events. You're held in by the fact that you cannot conceive of anything more perverted or downright weird going on - but read the book and find out - IT MAY CHANGE YOUR LIFE! It really is a view of the world and the human condition - try Luke Reinhardt's 'The Diceman' which deals with the same subject from albeit a very different angle........

...but i do not see why this is a "Masterpiece".

I must admit reading The 120 Days of Sodom was a bit confusing, because i was not sure if weather De Sade is encouraging the behavior depicted in the story (as a reversal of the norms: good is bad and bad is good, and all that matters is pleasuring ourselves no matter who gets hurt), or if he is simply painting the most grotesque picture of humanity to try to force us to look dead in the eye of what we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves.

I would say that the most horrific thing about this book is that the activities in it are not far-fetched at all, when compared to actual people and events throughout history: The Rape of Nanking, the holocaust, the rape and massacre of Bosnian women and children, The massacre of the East Timorese, Underground child porn/prostitution rings throughout the world, ... Dahmer, Bundy, Tepes, Hitler, Milosovich...i could go on forever.

also: Regarding my comments as to why i dont understand why so many consider this to be a masterpiece, it's because halfway through the book, the writing and details become sooo half A**ed. It's like De Sade started out with a great introduction giving us extensive backround to most of the characters, and then after the month of November just decided to completly
rush through everything like : "okaayyy. so this happend, and this, and this...and oh yeah, they did this and this and that, that that that, this this this... and um,ok, thats it, end of story, oh and hey, you'r free to decide for yourself what you think happend in the last 20 days of march for which i give absolutly no account for!! enjoy..."

that, and there is not enough character development. Much left to the imagination.

Also: one thing that seemed odd to me was that: we know the victims are aged 12-15, but yet they are always refereed to as "little boys/girls". To me, a little boy or girl would be no older than 9. Now I know this may seem pointless, but consider the fact that this book takes place in the 18th century, and in those days children were not regarded as they are today. Children in the old days were merely seen as adults, but younger, and it was not such a big deal for someone to have sex with someone who was say 13 years old. To me the term is also misleading because sexual intercourse with "little boy/girl" sounds a lot worse than it's actuall meaning in the book. Also keep in mind that these "Kid's" in the story are around the age of puberty anyway, and that is also the age which young teens usually start to experiment with sexual activity. Of course in no way am I saying that it's o.k what the libertines are doing to these children, just that it might sound a bit different to us 21st century folk, because I know for me, i kept thinking "Little" as in younger than ten, it just seemed strange for teenagers to be considered "Little children"...

Also: I must say that from a medical viewpoint, this book is not very realistic. Take for example, the dreaded Corophillia. It is common knowledge that consuming fecal matter is extremely hazardous to ones health (there is a very good reason it's called "Waste") and these libertines seem to have quite an appetite for it. Yet they are always healthy as a horse...

And the torture...
I feel that out of all the victims, Giton and Augustine endure the most and the worst tortures. Giton for example, undergoes such horrid treatment (i cant even describe it here, and do keep in mind that he's only TWELVE!) that would normally cause anyone, especially a twelve year old, to most likely go into shock and die, yet a couple days later, he is tortured yet again, even worse, and a couple days after that, he is even serving the libertines coffee, and tortured yet again before finally being "Dispatched"!!! Man, those 18th century tweenagers must sure have been getting their daily dose of vitamins and minerals...
But in all seriousnes, the affects the tortures had on the victims just were not very realistic.

Also: one thing I didn't quite understand was that, out of all the victims, why Zephyr and Adonis (except for a few floggings on Zephyr's part) were almost entirely imune to the torture that was being passed out (and most severly, it seemed, to the youngest of the group) to the other boys...

One more thing: Underneath all the possible messages De Sade was trying to send to his dear readers, was one (he probably didn't even mean to) that i thought was comparing these all powerful, undisputed libertines and how they rule over their victims and control every aspect of their lives, and none of the victims can defend themselves, they just hopelessly except their situation and deal with it, to the way those high in power in our world do as they please and make decisions over our heads, and we seem hopeless to do anything about it.

In conclusion: This is a good book and you must read it, for I feel it's point is to bring to light what we refuse to acknowledge about our selves, and if we continue to ignore this very serious issue, as we have done in the past, and do not come to terms with it, or try to fix it, the results will continue to be catastrophic.

of course, this is just from my understanding...

The 120 days of sodom's message could be either:
The world is rotten, change it!
or
Live your life the way you want, without any compassion whatsoever for anyone else. Indulge in every sense no matter who gets hurt.!!

I would have given this book five star's, but I wanted to commit suicide after reading it.. Although I do think highly of it, it's main flaw is that is dishes up such nastiness, and leaves us with nothing to comfort our forever stained minds. Nothing in the sense of "there is still hope"....no hope, just pain death and suffering. what we do dosnt matter, and it all ends in misery....

i suggest Justine, for someone who is unfamiliar with De Sade, as it is more philosophical, developed, in depth, and altogether enjoyable.

`120 Days of Sodom' is absolutely horrific and yet at the same time quite fascinating. Some reviewers have said that this book is totally offensive and disgusting while others have said that it's fairly tame and uninteresting. Both of these opinions are valid.

The story is similar in structure to Boccacio's `Decameron' or Chaucer's `Canterbury Tales' in that a series of stories are told sometimes in humourous fashion. In `120 Days', four prostitutes are recruited to gather a collection of young boys and girls to travel with four "libertines" to an impenetrable fortress where these stories will be told. Each whore relates tales for 30 days. After the days' stories are complete, the four "heroes" (as Sade describes them) act out some of what they've heard on the hapless children or just about anybody who happens to be near by to sometimes fatal consequences.

The 1st set of misadventures describes fairly tame perversions while the 4th details rather attrocious murderous sexual acts. The interesting thing about `120 Days' is that it's basically only in draft format. The 2nd and 3rd months are merely lists of the evil deeds while the 1st is in laborious detail and the last is only slightly fleshed out. It would have been fascinating if Sade had been able to edit it to a final copy. As it turns out, he thought it was lost when he was released from the Bastille (where he wrote it on a single scroll). He thought it was destroyed and never saw it again during his lifetime.

The `120 Days' while repetitive in many ways after the first few days of storytelling is fascinating in how evil of a character Sade could create. The debauchery, torture, mutilations, murders, etc. slowly build to a crescendo which I found to be particularly disturbing.

The other stories in this volume are really quite entertaining in a very dark way (especially "Ernestine"). The essay by Simone de Bouvoir ("Should we burn Sade?") is especially adroit in addressing the typical "Sade was a misogynist" commentary and provides an interesting philosophical study on his body of work.

This translation is surprisingly fluid and definitely a recommended read for any who have an interest in Sade. I find it particularly fascinating that `120 Days' was written in 1787. Fascinating in that I never see this on many banned book lists (while `Farenheit 451' and `The Grapes of Wrath' routinely are "outlawed"). Also, if you're not easily easily shocked and are looking for a "challenge", then you may want to try this one on for size.

I just wanted to notify those of the reviewers who criticised this book on the grounds of its insipidness and lack of detail, that this element was purely incidental.

The manuscript for 'The 120 days of sodom' was written whilst Sade was incarcerated in the Bastille in 1784. The work itself was written in the short time of just 37 days. Another factor accounting for its 'unfinished' quality was his lack of resources. In fact the manuscript was written in Sade's smallest handwriting on a 12 metre long role of parchment. Perhaps Sade forecasted the events of the storming of the Bastille and so hastened to finish his magnum opus. In some versions, Sade's footnotes can be seen, citing were he required to rectify mistakes and holes in his work. The unfinished portions contain many notes reminding Sade to complete them.

No doubt Sade would have completed this piece had he the chance. Unfortunately, he belived the manuscript lost, and wrote he "wept tears of blood" at its loss.


The piece as a whole has a paradoxical compelling/repelling nature. My mother was somewhat disturbed that her fifteen year old son was reading such perverse matireal, but I assured her of the deeper, more profound qualitites of the work. This is not something to be frowned upon, but marvelled at. The imagination and passion poured into this is hard to comprehend. The images of power and dominance, interpreted through sexual gratification are astounding.

So, do not criticise something without revising the circumstances. That would just be plain stupid.

In the opening pages of this rough draft of a "novel" titled "The 120 Days of Sodom", which was long believed to be lost and was re-discovered and first printed in 1904, more than a hundred years after it was written, the Marquis de Sade prepares the reader for what he claims is the most impure tale ever told. He was not far from the truth. This is less a novel and more a catalogue of every imaginable unusual sexual act that the very most extremely perverted imagination could ever think up. I really can't think of anything to add to Sade's long list of sexual possibilities. He covers it all.

The story begins with four, let us politely say "sexual adventurers" (many would say sexual criminals) who kidnap a bunch of women and whisk them off to a very, very secluded castle or mansion, where in four months every sexual proclivity is indulged in between nihilistic philosophical dialogues.

Sade advocated the removal of all social, moral, and sexual rules, and this book is his most fervent fantasy of that ideal. Trained psychologists and laymen alike will find it a fascinating look into the mind of sexual extremism.

David Rehak
author of "A Young Girl's Crimes"

De Sade is a powerful writer, an influential writer, and even an insightful writer. What he is *not* - even by his own stated standards - is a good writer. It's not a matter of moral sensibilities, because if you're intending to let yourself be outraged I can't imagine why you'd be reading this. His prose is enthusiastic, violent, sometimes downright childish, but when it comes down to it most of the time it is just plain awful.

I should mention, quickly, that if you intend on reading the 120 Days and you know what you're in for, this is a good edition to read. It has some very good supporting material, an excellent introduction by Klossowski, and some other writings of de Sade (including a more conventional published article that was simply hilarious).

Some very good essays exist by such authors as Bataille and Klossowski, however, that are probably more coherent presentations of his ideas than you'll find in his own work. I'll grant the importance of going straight to the source, of course, since that's why I read this myself. In retrospect, though, I would find reading a book of literary criticism *on* de Sade much more rewarding than this book.

It has never been an easy task to approach DeSade and make intelligent analyses of him. His very subject matter has for centuries caused serious students of literature and philosophy to relegate him to the hinterlands of social and moral acceptability. There are those even today who wish to present him as a man whose moral message--however disgusting--deserves the kind of appraisal given to more mainstream writers. I have read JUSTINE, JULIETTE, and 120 DAYS OF SODOM--no easy task there--and I have concluded that his appeal lies primarily in those who wish to peek under the blanket of the usual norms of most societies to expose the darker side that surely inhabits the souls of those who already are likely to wish to plow through the thousands of pages of tortured prose that mirrors the tortured ideas therein. In other words, in a free society such as ours, writers ought to feel free to indulge their demented fantasies while being secure in the knowledge that most readers have neither the time, inclination, nor patience to visit a world that is an anti-life as any ever written about.

Those who know of DeSade only by reputation are only vaguely aware that his interests are thoroughly grounded in areas of sexual perversion and torture that have led to his name being held synonymous with the wish to maim, torment, and disgust. For those who have actually gone to the trouble to read his works and are familiar with the general tools of literary criticism, such readers soon enough recognize that his literary impact rests primarily on just the three works listed above. In each of these three, DeSade posits a universe of closed in spaces. Most often, the protagonist is one who is powerful, wealthy, dissolute, and eager to convince his unwilling victims--usually young females--that the God of the Bible and the benevolent Nature of Wordsworth is a fiction created by blind and cowardly writers who refuse to see that life is Darwinian to the extreme. All that matters, his protagonists urge relentlessly, is that life belongs to the strong and the only way to justify the existence of the strong is to prey on the weak. Much of this line of reasoning sounds suspiciously like the extended monologue that George Orwell put into the mouths of victim Winston Smith and torturer O'Brien in 1984. O'Brien's comment to Smith that the future of the human race could be seen as a boot stamping forever on a human face is one that DeSade might have heartily agreed with. In order for DeSade's various dissolute priest/noblemen/merchants to carry out their respective debaucheries, they must first have a place of safety. These places of safety are most often underground, in cavernous dungeons of churches or brothels. The victims are usually kidnap victims as in JUSTINE or prostitutes held in bondage as in 120 DAYS OF SODOM. It is only in closed in boxes that DeSade's protagonists feel safe enough not only to carry out their deeds unseen but these boxes also give them a forum to fulminate against a benevolent God/Nature that does no more than to ensure a steady supply of helpless women whose only purpose in life is to justify the unlimited power of those who can exercise that power only in the limited confines of those walled-off dungeons.

As for what goes on in those closed in spaces, one finds--at least in 120 DAYS OF SODOM--not so much a standard novel of plot, character, theme, and setting, but rather a cataloging of a greviously long list of sin and evil. The list of both tormentor and victim is so depressingly long that one has trouble keeping straight who is doing what to whom. Instead, what the reader finds is a nameless and nearly faceless catalog of willing and unwilling participants. The evil that DeSade holds up as inverted good has no lasting impact on tormentor, victim, or reader. Victims are subject to horrendous bouts of necrophilia, coprophilia, sodomy, and cannibalism to such as extent that the ripples that ought to appear in the stream of an outraged consciousness are somehow muted. And that perhaps is the inner meaning of most of DeSade's thought. Evil and horror are such commonplaces in his inverted cosmos that those who are truly kind and decent are forced to see themselves as does Winston Smith in 1984: as one who is the last and dying remnant of his species. The world must then belong to those who trump the virtues of anti-life. That I can today even question whether DeSade has won out indicates that he has not.