The Fan-Maker's Inquisition [Hardcover]

Rikki Ducornet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 1999

Rikki Ducornet's boldest imaginative act yet-a brilliant novel about the Marquis de Sade that will forever change the way we regard one of history's most notorious men.

Picture a dramatic courtroom scene: during the French Revolution a fan-maker is on trial because of a manuscript seized in her rooms and her friendship with the Marquis de Sade, the notorious author of Justine, who has already been condemned and imprisoned by the same court for his sexual transgressions. Not only has she made exquisite and sexually provocative fans for her friend, but she has also coauthored with the Marquis a book about the infamous Spanish missionary, Bishop Landa, accusing him of massacres and other hideous abuses against the native population of the New World. The men of the court are so consumed with punishing the authors of this scandalous book that they are blinded to the folly of their own accusations against the Marquis.

The Fan-Maker's Inquisition is a novel about books and the reveries that enger them, about the intrinsic necessity of the sovereign imagination, and about the risks of passionate living and thinking.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Marquis de Sade, notorious Frenchman and sexual libertine, makes for a sensual, irreverent and politically illuminating subject in Ducornet's (Phosphor in Dreamland) lushly imagined seventh novel. This sumptuous tale is equal parts testimonial, epistolary exchange and reminiscence, opening in 1793 with the eponymous Fan-Maker (Gabrielle) facing an unidentified interrogator from the Parisian Comit? de Surveillance, attempting to defend her friendship with Sade, who's already been condemned to prison for his sexual crimes. In addition to being accused of creating blasphemous, erotic fans for Sade, Gabrielle is also known to have collaborated with him on a denunciatory book exposing Spanish Inquisitor Bishop Diego de Landa's vicious treatment of the Mayas in the Y#catan in 1562. Landa is accused of torturing and murdering the natives of the New World and stripping the Mayas of their pagan belief system, all in the name of the Church. While it is the notorious book that immediately endangers the composed, eloquent Fan-Maker, she's also vulnerable as a known lesbian and libertine. At the Comit?'s request, she reads and explains the raging missives she's received from Sade; they are tantalizingly detailed and incendiary. The theatrical format exacerbates the polemical tone of the book, in which the excesses of French Revolutionary philistines and the Spanish Inquisition's barbarism are made exhaustively clear. In the latter half of the narrative, Sade becomes narrator, treating the reader to his perspective on the courageous Fan-Maker. He reveals the letter she composed on the eve of her execution, and he lovingly describes her devotion to Olympe de Gouges, a radical playwright and fellow victim of the Comit?. Ducornet's prose is necessarily and carefully shaded toward purple, often starkly ribald or phantasmic. She convincingly interpolates Sade's audacious, epigrammatic voice, his passion for carnal freedoms and hatred for banal taboos. Her language is an ecstatic performance, with transformational potency that begs to be read aloud. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The Marquis de Sade is so monstruous that he ought to have been conjured up by a novelist. Here, an imaginative novelist does conjure up Sade. The story centers on a fan-maker whose creations for Sade depict exquisitely outrageous sex scenes. Now the Revolution has descended, Sade is in prison, and the fan-maker is on trial for her presumed part in his debauches. During the trial, it is revealed that the two have collaborated on a manuscript imputing acts of horrific torture and killing to Spanish Inquisitor Bishop Landa in South AmericaAacts of course more awful than anything Sade has dreamed up. What's more, the fan-maker has been passionately involved with the notorious Olympe de Gouges. The story is related entirely through trial transcriptions, letters, and manuscript, and though the structure cracks a little mid-way through, it's mostly a bracing and original way to tell this intriguing tale. Throughout, there's a real tension: Sade is defended for "dar[ing] to take imagination's darkest path," yet ideas are also shown to be profoundly dangerous. A thought-provoking book for sophisticated readers.
-ABarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (November 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805059261
• ISBN-13: 978-0805059267
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #913,374 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Complicates the Sade we thought we knew, July 9, 2000

By 

Alan DeNiro "alan_deniro" (Oakdale, MN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (Hardcover)

The prose was incandescent, and I think rooting the story in an actual historical turn of events helped Ducornet to ground the poetry; otherwise, the language would have been a helium balloon floating up, up and away out of sight. What I loved most about this novel was that Sade was a deeply HUMAN figure--he wasn't some caricature of himself. The dream sequences and hallucinations blend together with 'actual' events, and the novel is peppered with recipes, feasts, fans, escapades, and more than a few lessons on the follies of colonialism. I especially liked how the author was trying to make a parallel between the brutal colonization of the native peoples of the New World with the way that the dour leaders (keepers of 'public morality') of the French revolution were trying to 'colonize' (in other words, fence in and control) the imagination of Sade and those close to him. If I had one complaint with the novel, it would be the ending...I just wish it had a LITTLE more narrative force and conclusiveness to it. But otherwise, this book is a highly recommended piece of literature; you don't read it as much as experience and interact with its sensuality.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Escapist's Time Capsule, December 9, 1999

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (Hardcover)

Rikki Ducornet's luscious little novel, subtitled "A Novel of the Marquis de Sade", invites us to pause, clear our preconceptions, open our minds, and go on a fantasy journey back in history to the time of the French Revolution. The Fan-Maker of the title, a close ally to the Marquis de Sade who is imprisoned for his many "crimes against society, the Church, morals, sexuality, etc ad infinitum", is herself on trial for complicity in aiding Sade in writing his last novel. Through the question/answer of the Inquisition format we are allowed to hear and read the words of Sade and, in this setting, catch a glimpse at how history has perhaps cloaked a wholly Dionysian character in an injurious criminal jacket. Being a novel, Ducornet has poetic license to retell Sade's behavioral quirks as interpreted by a sensual and erudite Gabrielle whose occupation is to make fans depicting graphic sexual fantasies. For some, this approach to the point of the book may be off putting. For the reader fortunate enough to linger over this very small book the rewards are a revised look at an important period of time, told in a manner that brings us all the atmosphere, smells, idiosyncrasies, elegance, and grit of a Paris under the ever-present blade of the guillotine. This is a treasure of a novel and Ducornet has created an utterly unique mode of storytelling. To quote her in the words of her character "What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading." And this book is most defintiely a dream. A grand and erudite escape!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Fan-Maker" Will Win Fans, January 27, 2000

By 

Peter Savage "seriously" (Near Portland, ME USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (Hardcover)

Ducornet is an excellent writer, and this book is clear proof that she's one we'll have to watch for in coming years. What distinguishes this from the pack is her clear grasp of De Sade's thinking, and an amazing knack of making a pastiche of his style. The parts told in his voice really do sound like him. The fan-maker herself is a less well-defined character, but you find yourself believing her feisty responses to the dullwitted Revolutionary tribunal. All the prejudices, pretensions and illogicalities of the French Revolution are paraded in this short, but remarkably well-constructed book. The fan-maker, her lover and De Sade represent freedom, while the parallels between the Revolution and the Inquisition's behavior in Central America are clearly drawn, in splendidly gory fashion. Not for the timid or puritanical, but you won't read a better-written 'historical' novel this year.