Customer Reviews

The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

The French Revolution is upon us, and the Marquis de Sade (back in literary fashion lately) languishes in prison, diseased, old, and furious. And why not? The most perverted, unleashed sensations he ever concocted are nothing compared to the executions outside his window, the news from the streets, his memories of a Jesuit education. To occupy his days, and vent his rage, he writes a book about the 16th century Mayan destruction at the hands of the inquisitor Bishop Landa. His coauthor is the Fan-Maker, whom we meet at her own Revolutionary inquisition. Educated, self-sufficient, enigmatic, her voice joins Sade's and that of the tormented, tormenting Landa. The narrative shuttles back and forth between several forms and places, abruptly, and elusive as fevered memories. Also, a note to the reader: Sade was an intelligent man, but not a nice one, and given in Ducornet's book to incredibly blunt expression. Like the Fan-Maker's creations, this small book wafts elegantly to and fro, to various purposes.

The Fanmaker's Inquisition mixes tv courtroom drama, sexual intensity, imagination and ideas against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Ducornet manages to bring a live a partucularly dramatic peice of political and social history in this novel as well as exploring contemporary ideas of sexuallity and identity.
This is a beautiful, well researched, and powerfully convincing book, and I would recomend it to everyone except my dear grandmother.

"The Fan-Maker's Inquisition" is an exploration of the thoughts and passions of the Marquis de Sade through letters and journal entries written during his imprisonment and a transcript of the fan-maker's trial. Its prose is lush and its topics various, flowing from page to page in vivid succession. As a series of words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, the book is a marvelous success.

But as a story, it's a dismal failure. There is no discernible plot. The book cowritten by Sade and the fan-maker (interspersed in sections throughout) - without a doubt the most engaging, and easiest to follow, component of this novel - is too thinly spread to be memorable and bears too little relationship to the rest of the story to resonate meaningfully with it. The remainder - pages and pages - is comprised largely of lists of hedonistic pleasures, primarily food and sexual escapades. While this is certainly believable as the preoccupation of an imprisoned Sade, it makes for unexciting reading.

On its jacket, and in its other reviews, "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition" is billed as a revolution in thought, in the art of thinking and living passionately. It certainly has the beginnings of such an accomplishment, with its deft use of words, its vivid descriptions, and its wide range of subject matter (its purview includes, besides food and sex, religion, the settlement of the Americas, and the crafting and uses of fans). But without a plot, and a definitive ending, the book languishes in its own excessive use of ideas.

The style of the book took some getting used to, but the actual story is pretty interesting.

A female fan-maker in Revolutionary France befriends the ever-licentious Marquis de Sade, and makes fans with "provacative scenes" depicted on them. The whole story is told in an interrogation setting, when the fan-maker is on the stand in court testifying about her relationship with the Marquis.

It has been many years since I read this book but I've never forgotten this gem though my copy was lent and not returned years ago. I am going to buy another copy so I can enjoy it again. Ducornet is a gifted writer, as Alan de Niro, Grady Harp, and others have already stated quite eloquently in their reviews. One reviewer suggested that readers should read the Marquis de Sade rather than this book but I have always found Sade's writing more dull than erotic. Chacun a son gout. Perhaps Sade is more erotic if read in the original French.

In "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition," the Marquis is a regular client, of the fan-maker of the title, Gabrielle. He orders custom-painted erotic fans. I remember that I learned a lot about the process of making fans by hand, which interested me, and about Olympe de Gouges, about whom I knew almost nothing and with whom Gabrielle has an affair (fictional, of course, since Gabrielle is a fictional character.) It was interesting, although very sad, to learn about the Spanish Inquisition's treatment of the Mayans. The Inquisition was begun to save people from falling into heresy, i.e., to save souls, but its noble goals were badly tarnished by the way some inquisitors, particularly the Spanish inquisitors, went about this task. Garielle and the Marquis work together on a book about Bishop Diego de Landa, the Spanish Inquisitor who treated the Mayans so badly. It's an interesting parallel for the ways in which the French Revolution's noble goals went so badly awry. It should make you think about the perils of human attempts to do good, the apparently easy slide into cruelty when one has power.

Not surprisingly, after having an affair with Olympe de Gouges, making erotic fans for the Marquis de Sade and collaborating with the marquis on a book critical of the Inquistion, Gabrielle finds herself called before the "Inquisition," but this time it's not an Inquisition by the Church trying to save a soul but one conducted by the state. That's the post-revolutionary French state, the one that outlawed religion, drowned hundreds of priests in the noyades at Nantes, posed a prostitute as the goddess of liberte on the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and so on, acting against a Citizen because her morals don't meet with their approval. It's richly ironic; atheist revolutionaries as Puritans.


Those interested in this book and/or the French Revolution may also be interested in the CD "L'autrichienne" by Jucifer.

http://www.amazon.com/L-Autrichienne-Jucifer/dp/B0012NHN7M/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t

A couple of customer reviews to show the connection between the CD and "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition":

"Jucifer's beautifully raw and complete masterpiece depicting Marie Antoinette and events leading to the Reign of Terror punches you hard in the gut, then gently kisses you as you fall. You'll feel your bones crunching under chords of sickening despair, and the most melodic moments will have you tearfully soaring with hope and glimmering beauty."

"Even if you're not a metal or experimental-noise fan, you'll want to own this - particularly in double pink vinyl. Amber knows how to go to extremes of decibels and silence in the way King Crimson did during their "Red/Starless" period. And the quieter acoustic periods capture with grace the sense of Marie Antoinette awaiting a certain fate. Sometimes when you see Jucifer's wall of amps, you wonder if the duo knows how to be subtle. They know, and show it here. This is not as much a soundtrack album for The Terror, as it is a soundtrack for Thermidor, the post-Terror period when aristocratic youth went around beating up the sans-culotte Jacobins and poor (note that one track even refers to Thermidor). Does it sound like an 18th-century Clockwork Orange? So does Jucifer. Steam punks unite."


The liner notes for the CD are a great summary of the events of the reign of Louis and Marie Antoinette, the French Revolution, the Terror, Thermidor, quite handy if it's been a while since you studied world history or perhaps never had a course that covered this period of history.

Dancing alone in your kitchen. 'Do not grasp the bird too tightly...' Think of the way water implies depth through color and movement. This book muscled it's way into my reading schedule and kept me thinking and re-thinking. I can only relate how this book felt inside of me, but as with all books that leave you feeling, sensing and imagining there is the urge to send this out to others. It is the Hero's plight. I felt, sensed and saw all these marvelous things. Can you experience them as well?

"There is no explosion except a book." Ducornet opens her novel with these words from Mallarme. That this novel were an explosion! For explosions of the sort she refers to are what we need more of! But her pages are simply too damp and the light they give out, when ignted, too pale. And when compared to her inspirer, de Sade himnself, or his most lucid reader, Annie Le Brun, the poetry grows ever weaker and the reasoning, blanched as it is by a smothering tide of descriptions, both elegant and profane, too boring. If you wish the promise of perfumes and scandal, then Ducornet is your guide. But if you wish the reality that the promise shadows, pick up de Sade, isolate yourself and read from cover to cover -- for nothing more than to give him his due! de Sade exists in the words he wrote, and no where else...