The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

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.

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?

doesn't pack the punch of Marat Sadethe rats are in the corn shorn for recondite erudite energy energy saith ducornet a faust for a daydoesn't pack the files of a Marat Sade

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.

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!