Juliette
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend “An amazing sequence of imaginatively bizarre sexual adventures punctuated by philosophical and theological digression. Mlle. De Maupin, Lolita, Candy—all pale beside Juliette.”—Library Journal Product details and pricing info |
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25 Customer Reviews Posted
- Advanced Reading
- The Marquis is deep, complex, simple, intelligent and in your face. Outside of "Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man" however, his work is definately hard to get into. For lack of a better term, this is advanced reading, but it's worth it.
- 2008-12-03, 0 of 1 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- 1216 Pages of Sophistry
- What can I say?
The Characters (except for Juliette herself) are uninteresting and hollow.
The Plot... there is no plot. Juliette is a series of episodes, much like Candid, except Voltaire didn't drag it out for over a thousand pages.
Depending upon how you interpret it, Juliette is either a badly written compendium of sophistry and sadistic pornography or a brilliant satire on Voltaire's philosophical fables and the "Libertine" genre of literature. If Sade was intending the demonstrate the utility of being a violent sociopath he failed. The longwinded rationalizations (endlessly reiterated ad naseum) of Sade's libertines are full of more holes than Scientology. None of their victims ever resist their abuse or attempt to retaliate as would be expected and those that survive never think of exacting vengeance. If we assume, however, that Juliette is a satire the best that could be said is that it is amusing for about 300 pages.
If there is any value here, it is a glimpse into the workings of the rarest and most terrifying strain of psychopathology. Juliette is not simply a sociopath whose lack of empathy allows her to mercilessly take whatever she wants from others without guilt or restraint. That is all too common in this world. Juliette is a woman who positively relishes evil for it's own sake. Like the reverse image of a saint who does good for others with no thought of reward, Juliette enjoys visiting death and horror upon her victims regardless of whether doing so benefits her in any palpable way. For that alone, Juliette is a book worth reading. - 2008-09-13, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- The logical outcome of excess
- This book is everything said below. It is incredible. It is horrible. I apologize for the cliche, but is like watching the wreck you can't help but look at, and it can hit you hard or bore you to death. More than anything it is the ultimate answer to the question of the effects of surrendering to unlimited excess, not only in the story, but in the structure of the book itself. The characters are demonstrating a life without control, a life of excess (importantly, de Sade recognizes that social class and material wealth are no barrier to such a life), and their actions are chronicled in excess. Strictly speaking, the book can be easily described: 50 pages of libertine sex, followed by 50 pages of philosophy, then 50 of sex, etc etc on and on for over 1000 pages. After about the third repetition you realize de Sade hasn't all that much to say; worth hearing, for sure, but not at such length.By any artistic standard, it is as self-indulgent as the characters in it.
As for the characters, in the end you see that whatever their embrace of excess enabled them to do, it was really rather limited - in the end, all came out the same (partial pun intended). So you see them do the same few (despite the many times de Sade repeats them) things over and over. The people they torment are ciphers, not people, nothing to be identified with, so they all really mean nothing. The final impression of his characters are husks of thorough emptiness.
The repetitive structure of the book has the same effect. A less self-indulgent writer would have cut the book by 90% and included everything de Sade has to say, both philosophically and sexually. As it stands, for whatever combination of fascination and incredulity it may hold, it is a slog to get through - one of those books that you get into and you feel you HAVE to finish rather than WANT to finish.
Nevertheless it gets 5 stars. It is quite frankly not for everybody. It is not for the faint of heart - or stomach - and one must be able to confront the darkest part of oneself. For, as has been noted by others (and is in any case painfully obvious), it is really all about power over others, and that is a side most of us can identify with, even if the means de Sade uses are a bit too much. It exposes the solipsism of the darkest side of the human soul, and takes it to its logical extreme and outcome - the logical outcome of excess.
P.S. to those who find this review excessive, I apologize. :) - 2008-03-29, 1 of 2 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Evil never sounded so good...
- 1200 pages. Its been said that actually reading Sade from cover to cover like you would an `ordinary' novel is a test of one's mental and even physical endurance. The seeming endless catalog of escalating violence and perversion in a series of episodes so outrageously obscene they begin to border on the comic, so obsessively repetitious they become mind-numbing is said to make *Juliette* virtually unreadable. It took me two-and-a-half weeks to finish this marathon of horrors and Im delighted to report it wasn't nearly as grueling as advertised.
What often goes unremarked is that Sade is a surprisingly funny writer. Yes, funny. It's hard not to miss the hyperbolic parody of much of *Juliette,* although many do, especially those who haven't read Sade in his entirety or in context. The prudish, those easily offended, they'll have a hard time finding anything to laugh about here, too. Sade is a literary shock-jock. But what's also surprising is how many of Sade's social positions are not only quintessentially "enlightened," but serve as the very foundation of a considerable amount of "liberal" thought. Sade is pro-choice, against capital punishment, a champion of homosexuality, free love, and feminism, a fierce enemy of monarchy and the Church and all forms of fundamentalism--he envisions a society of liberated men and women pursuing their individual happiness outside the moral censure of both the majority and the minority. Sade could, in fact, be considered the grandpappy of our me-first, me-only age.
Of course, Sade carries his radical position of extreme personal freedom to its logical end--in rape, theft, and murder. And, perhaps, the most overlooked aspect of Sade is that his philosophy of mayhem is the "logical" end of personal freedom, its ultimate justification.
Far from advancing his ideas in the manner of a raving lunatic as he's often portrayed, Sade does so with cold, exacting, rational arguments. At times, *Juliette* reads like a satanic version of Plato's dialogues. But whereas Plato based Western civilization on his rational "proof" that reason is synonymous with good, Sade does the exact opposite, using rational deduction to prove that reason is synonymous with evil. What lends Sade's argument its shattering power is that whereas behind Plato's there's always the ghost of an a priori teleological principle of dubious and ultimately unprovable existence, Sade bases his conclusions on the indisputable facts of observable nature--a nature, he's always quick to point out, that is red in tooth and claw. Grounding his dialectic in every creature's natural self-interest, he can never be proved wrong in thinking the "worst" of man. For everything, even pity, generosity, love, and self-sacrifice can be seen as self-interest. The only thing that checks our instinctive and insatiable appetites are fear, superstition, social-conditioning, oppression, and stupidity. And it's the rulers, priests, and rich who make certain the rest of us remain in the dark, a.k.a. living "morally," while they, shielded by their wealth, power, and hypocrisy feed off the rest of us poor fools.
Taking a look at history, at the world today, it's hard to argue. Indeed, it seems a fact: we live in a Sadeian universe and convince ourselves we don't with the comforting lullabies of religion, social and political idealisms, and fuzzy fellow feeling. We want to believe that reason is synonymous with good, truth with beauty, but the key word is "believe." We want to believe it because the alternative, with exaggeration for effect, is the harsh world Sade reveals to us in *Juliette.*
What makes Sade so revolutionary is not only that he writes scenes of sexual violence that can still shock, disgust, and outrage contemporary sensibilities--I refer the reader in particular to Juliette's sexcapades with the Pope!--but that by proving that reason can be used just as easily, if not more effectively, to justify evil as it originally was used to justify good, Sade stood all of western morality on its head. Reading through the extensive philosophical speculations connecting all the dirty parts of *Juliette,* the reader recognizes the ideas of many of the most prominent thinkers and writers of the next two centuries already prefigured. There's a reason that Sade has been one of the seminal figures for generations of our most prominent philosophers and authors--his sordid outpourings of blood and semen have directly or indirectly fertilized minds with the seeds of that tree upon which grows the most forbidden fruit of all.
One of those rare books that truly has the power to shake your most firmly held beliefs and even change your life, *Juliette*is the Bible of Evil, probably never to be equaled, certainly impossible to surpass. I don't think it an exaggeration to say that no reader of intelligence and culture should die without reading this book. - 2007-11-16, 3 of 3 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Marquis is a God
- The god of Evil, the Marquis has stunning words that are absolutely beautiful, simultaneously the epitome of disgust. I worship his literary genius.
- 2006-07-21, 2 of 12 people found this review helpful, Rated:
