avfuentes

** spoiler alert ** I don't know if this is the version I read. I read, I think, the Project Guttenberg version, whichever one that is. This is not the Sade to read if you want to get turned on. (Unless you get turned on by poop, in which case, stop reading this and get to it.) The frame of the book is a moral outrage against war profiteers, which seems quite apropos in our time. (The four libertines who drive the plot, kidnap women and children and take them into a mountain retreat where four harlots tell stories every night for a month and in between various sex acts are committed.) I considered mounting a reading of it as a war protest, but as most people don't want to read about poop much less hear about it... Sade apparently thought this MS was lost. He'd never been able to finish it and I think he would have had to rework significantly to do so. Any writer could immediately see how ambitious his project is from the outline he's left. The 120 days are supposed to increase in sexual violence from day 1 to day 120. This is the literary version of building an aquaduct with a slight but steady slope... a difficult feat for engineers and for writers. I don't, frankly, think Sade had the discipline or skill to do this. In the first 30 days, he describes such depravities that he has virtually no room to move and according to his plan he has 90 days left. Finished or unfinished, he just wasn't going to make it. He has written out the end scenario and describes the last day at the castle where pretty much everybody dies. His outline between day 30 and day 119 is pretty funny. Impossible to prove, but I think he might well have just abandoned it, realizing that it required more work than he wanted to put into it. Again, not the best Sade if you want to get turned on. That's Justine if you ask me.

2023-03-01 21:44