Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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56 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comic and cruel, 16 Mar 2001
De Sade's opus and no surprise that his name would forever more be synonymous with vicious acts meted out purely for sexual gratification. A catalogue of sexual deviations, degenerating into ever-increasing cruelty as a group of captives (mainly children) are tormented and tortured to death.An excellent translation. It is a surprisingly comic work which draws the reader in. It is also a subversive work, portraying the horrors as perpetrated by those with the unlimited resources to indulge their murderous tastes and the power or connections to avoid having to answer for them. Often they represent the law, as with the judge who always sentences everyone appearing before him to death, so that he can watch the execution from an overlooking apartment whilst fornicating at the same time. Written in prison, it is incomplete. Only the first 30 days have been written out in full; the rest being in note form. It still makes for entertaining reading, although it is probably this incompleteness which makes the entire work disproportionately concerned with eating excrement (one of the earlier and milder sexual quirks). Even in a world largely numbed to horror, some of this stuff is still unbelievable. Essential reading for anyone interested in the human psyche.
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42 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Read it for the right reasons!, 18 April 2000
See a bishop, a nobleman, a lawyer and a banker getting up to their antics, which I would call murderous, except that it`s fiction. In real life, these types get up to REAL murderous things - but they won`t be found here. Instead, many will probably buy and read it for the wrong reasons. I would issue a warning that this is not Sade`s best work by a long shot and will teach you nothing about Sade as a man and thinker; only about his bitterness in prison. It is important to remember, if you buy this book, that it was Sade`s revulsion for atrocity and hypocrisy which prompted him to write this Absurdist saga. Recommended, but NOT as an introduction for one who is ignorant of Sade! For better intros, carry on down the list of works and check out FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY and MAURICE LEVER. Or read: THE MYSTIFIED MAGISTRATE, CRIMES OF LOVE, or GOTHIC TALES. (And better still: LETTERS FROM PRISON) Anthony Walker.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A translation for people who don't actually want to read Sade, 11 Aug 2009
From the translator's note: "In making this new translation, the aim was to present the book in something more resembling a completed state. With some minimal editing and restructuring, and by wherever possible correcting mistakes and filling in important gaps - mainly by following Sade's working notes and later reflections, but occasionally by extrapolating from the existing text - it is hoped that this monumental masterwork, one of the cornerstones of modern literature, has now been restored to a version more appropriate for a 21st century readership."
I will leave it up to you to decide whether this is the kind of translation that you want to pay money for, but I would rather not be presented with a book that has been "restructured", "corrected", and "filled in", in order to make it more "appropriate" for my reading. Some of these points may be valid considering that Sade lost the manuscript, but as there are no notes anywhere in the book to say where the editorial corrections and extrapolations have been introduced, it is literally impossible to say what it is that you are reading: Take any randomly chosen sentence and ask yourself, is this from Sade's text or is it the translator's corrected version?
Nor is any information given about the nature of Sade's supposed "working notes and later reflections", where have these come from? Although Sade wrote the manuscript quickly he had been preparing it for some time and he had a further three and a half years to check it before it was finally lost to him, so the need to correct mistakes and fill in gaps seems unwarranted, especially as it has not occurred to any other editor, English or French, to take on such a responsibility. Furthermore, checking the text against the French reveals that it has hardly undergone "minimal editing and restructuring", as the crucial Introduction has been reduced by half and completely reorganised, removing the extensive background details about the characters and their agreements prior to establishing their retreat.
Contrary to the publisher's blurb, this version in no way supersedes the earlier edition and is very far from being "uncensored". Simply translating "décharge" as "cock juice" does not make the text more accurate, as décharge just means "discharge", and if that is what Sade wrote why replace his terms with something that only sounds adolescent? Considering that "Philosophy in the Boudoir" is now available as a Penguin Classic, this kind of sloppiness in relation to Sade's writings is in no way acceptable.
It seems as though Solar Books have decided that they want a more reader-friendly version to market, one that is less challenging and more streamlined, easier to consume, which is of course hardly what Sade would have wanted.
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