The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

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.

I like it when someone borrows your well-tattered grove press paperback copy of this book with a 20th century "I'm soooo jaded.." smirk on thier face and all-knowing and all judging raised eyebrow. I also like it when they return the book. No more smirk..no more raised eyebrow...no more judgement. Just a blank stare that goes right through you and a mumbled "Thanks". And a change in attitude that stays with them for life. De Sade had to include the gore and pornography in his books to hide his religious and political views. In his lifetime the most punishment ( if any ) meted out for flogging, toturing and killing YOUR OWN servants was minimal. The punishment for his kind of blasphamy was the old neck knife ! Plus, you've got to hand it to someone who could write this prolifically with a non-ballpoint pen.

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 Rehakauthor of "A Young Girl's Crimes"

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.

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........