Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83743 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01-10
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 799 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780802130129
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)

Customer Reviews

Sade's Masterpiece
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.

Disgusting and Horrifying
The Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom is the most disgusting and horrifying work of fiction that I've ever read. The story is simple: four eighteenth-century French libertines spend an entire winter in an isolated chateau, cut off from the outside world, listening to fantastic tales of sexual violence and perversion, then acting out these fantasies on a helpless group of sex slaves. It's not much of a story, actually: there is no plot or character development, and by the end of the book de Sade has discarded narrative altogether, simply listing each days' atrocities, one after another. He concludes The 120 Days with a chillingly matter-of-fact tally of casualties and survivors, which reads like a report from the Commandant from a Nazi concentration camp.

Now that it's over, I'm extremely ambivalent about The 120 Days of Sodom: it's a remarkable book, but I'm not sure that it's a very good book. Many of the previous reviewers have praised The 120 Days of Sodom as a work of philosophy, but all I found was the occasional philosophical aside between sex scenes. The 'sex' in those scenes is brutal and grotesque, and the explicit depictions of coprophilia in particular made me ill. (The reviewer who described this as "pretty tame stuff" was simply posturing.) The critical essays by de Beauvoir and Klossowski at the start of the book assured me that de Sade made a serious philosophical point with this novel, but whatever this point was, it escaped me: there was more philosophy in de Sade's brief "Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man" than in all the hundreds of pages of this novel put together. Perhaps de Sade's other novels, Justine and Juliette, are more reflective.

To be fair, I should mention that, in addition to The 120 Days of Sodom, this edition also contains a play by de Sade and some short stories from The Crimes of Love, which were considerably easier to read and more entertaining than the novel itself. There is also an interesting essay on the history of the novel and some amusing correspondence between de Sade and one of his critics.

Everyone seems to gloss over...
...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.