Rating: 
Summary: Monstrous To Da Max!
Review: I give this four stars because though the ideas and philosophy are very insightful and something everyone should read, it does get very repetitious. On a sex aspect, he gets right into it, but it starts off relatively soft and eases into the harder, so-called 'sadistic', side in a way that makes me think he wanted to numb the reader before continuing so that a monstrosity near the middle of the book wouldn't stun as much as it would if it were right in the beginning, that we would accept the lesser acts since this new act is obviously much, much worse. The 'power brings corruption' theme is also very strong. Philosophically this is an engaging book but if you ever step back from it you recognize that by page 300 he's said pretty much all he's going to - it's engaging but he either goes too fast or makes it too long (its 1,200 pages now, but the intro said that at one time it was 4,000 or more, which makes me wonder what happened to all the rest, what it was like, and if it had any other new philosophy in it). I would be intrigued to read another of his to see if he has enough ideas to keep it up for more than one book or if his books are all repeptitious.
Rating:
Summary: well
Review: I give this four stars because though the ideas and philosophy are very insightful and something everyone should read, it does get very repetitious. On a sex aspect, he gets right into it, but it starts off relatively soft and eases into the harder, so-called 'sadistic', side in a way that makes me think he wanted to numb the reader before continuing so that a monstrosity near the middle of the book wouldn't stun as much as it would if it were right in the beginning, that we would accept the lesser acts since this new act is obviously much, much worse. The 'power brings corruption' theme is also very strong. Philosophically this is an engaging book but if you ever step back from it you recognize that by page 300 he's said pretty much all he's going to - it's engaging but he either goes too fast or makes it too long (its 1,200 pages now, but the intro said that at one time it was 4,000 or more, which makes me wonder what happened to all the rest, what it was like, and if it had any other new philosophy in it). I would be intrigued to read another of his to see if he has enough ideas to keep it up for more than one book or if his books are all repeptitious.
Rating:
Summary: don't bother lookin' for Romeo...
Review: I just finished reading this mammoth of a book, and, I'm here to report, it lived up to the reputation it has acquired. I consider myself one of the most jaded, cynical, steel-bellied readers around. When I read all of the reviews for "Juliette", as well as Sade's other works, I scoffed at all the warnings for the faint-hearted; the challenges to withstand the terrible text! I was not offended by what I read, but these reviewers weren't kidding! The sex can get quite preposterous and impossibly indulgent, but many reviewers take this way too literally and discredit Sade for not understanding the human anatomy and it's thresholds and limitations. There's no question in my mind that the Marquis was well aware that many of the things he wrote were physically impossible; but, where's the fun if you don't take it to the extreme? I often found myself- once the appetite was whetted- wanting him to magnify every act, every atrocity until it had peaked... and, then go further. This is part of the beauty of the arts (in any form): it gives you a chance to be as crazy, as demented, as grotesque, as you desire, since it's all happening in your head; and, you don't even have to provide the fodder for this mill of depravity- Sade graciously delivers it. What makes it even more twisted is that it's written in such a Shakespearean- term used lightly- theatrical way, reminding you that this is a translation of a book written 200 years ago! Nobody in this day and age has duplicated the literary horrors that this libertine philosopher put forth. They wouldn't get published! The "plot": Juliette, a young girl in a convent, meets a nun, Madame Delbene, who takes the philosophical- and physical- roots that she sees in little Juliette, and nurtures them, teaching her about the absurdities of prejudices, religious beliefs, and societal morals. Our title character is taught the maxim that will resonate as a constant throughout the entire novel: self-preservation and pleasure at no matter who or what's expense. As Hobbes wrote in "Leviathan"-- life is nasty, brutish, and short. We are animals and everything we do in an attempt to civilize ourselves goes against the accords of Nature. We help others to benefit ourselves or to feel selfish pride; we refrain from acts of murder, thievery, etc. only out of fear of being caught. All of these thoughts/philosophies are proffered, but, Sade is not afraid to back up all of his ideas with in-depth, analytical dissertations which are sometimes strewn with holes... and sometimes impossible to refute! Juliette takes her new-found "education", and the story follows her as she puts everything- and anything- into practice. No matter what your beliefs, be they religious, political, moral, it can only benefit you to consider the other side's viewpoint: liberal vs conservative, God-fearer vs atheist, good vs evil. It is only then that you have made a healthy, well-founded decision on what to believe in. Read "Juliette" and see the other side...
Rating: 
Summary: Take away about 1200 pages and it might be ok...
Review: I read most (all right, some) of this book. But as I was skipping ahead, I did not notice any significant change in the "plot" or "themes" (I use these terms very loosely). I am not shocked easily. However, I must say that I was shocked by this book. Shocked that an author can repeat the same mindless drivel, with no characterization, no plot, and hardly any development to speak of for as long as Sade managed to in Juliette. While initially titillating, I found the book to be ultimately exasperating, his nihilism juvenile, his philosophical cynicism infantile, his plotting sophomoric, and his point, well I must admit, I never found that.
Rating: 
Summary: Bible.
Review: If you are looking for a break from everyday's philosophy built on christianity or other dull mind-games - this book is for you. read it slow and don't quit.
Rating: 
Summary: What badly put together dribble.... Sade CAN NOT write
Review: If you look at the book from 30,000 feet and just review it for writing style, cohesive storyline, knowledge of one's subject and some sort of skill at prose then this text is a dismal failure. Now let's throw in the story of Juliette corrupted at an early age and it goes down hill from there. I have never read such repetitive nonsense in my life. I guess Sade could get away with writing such inane dribble because people were just not aware of human anatomy and the consequences of a lot of what he writes about. A lot of the torture is not possible in the context he uses, it just won't work. If you can get past the unbelievable torture methods and just plain bad writing you have an unblievably boring story. I have to be honest and admit I started skipping pages this stuff was so dry. After awhile it doesn't disgust, it doesn't shock and it certainly never entertained. DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS JUNK.
Rating: 
Summary: .
Review: It's not great literature, and were it not for the shock and humor value, it would fail to even be engaging literature. As a matter of fact, it does get painfully tedious after the first couple hundred pages, when you begin to realize that the book is not building towards anything in particular but is just going to be going on and on and on in the established fashion (stomach-turning sadistic sexual exploits told in fancy old-english prose interupted here and there by philosophical discourses.) Still, this is well worth reading (at least through to the end of Part 1 or so.) Most seriously philosophers and scholars dismiss De Sade's philosophy of evil, and while it is certainly not the end-all be-all in the realm of intellectual thought, I personally felt there were many moments of exceptional profundity in his philosophical diatribes, which efficiently and aptly tear apart the fallacy of "goodness" while offering a fresh way to look at morality in general. Essentially, the philosophical portions of the book elaborate a well-thought-out system which entirely justifies and applauds any act of Evil imaginable (the non-philosophical portions illustrate just how far the imagination can go, once let loose on this path), and furthermore encourages such acts, while condemning acts we would typically view as "moral" and "virtuous" as symptoms of a profound inner weakness. It may sound upsetting to some, and it is certainly every decent, church-going American's worst nightmare put down on paper, but one needn't except Evil as the ultimate Good in order to get something of value out of De Sade. Rather, this serves as a profound illustration of the fact that any actions one takes in life can, when it comes down to it, be logically and powerfully argued as virtuous -- and morality itself becomes little more than a flimsy whim of subjectivity; an entirely man-made self-defense mechanism that is the result of the ego's desire to convince itself that it is somehow noble and transcendant, or at least has an established "system" for how to become so. The fact that De Sade's "system" makes more sense than Christianity's definitely says something worth thinking about. And that isn't: "Go out and kill and torture young children before enacting all of your darkest fantasies on their corpses," which is where De Sade prefers to take it, being the sick puppy he is -- but rather: "Look at the beliefs you accept and the values you hold honestly, for they are a weak, contradictory, and ultimately meaningless attempt to understand your life in the simplest, easiest terms possible." Basically, the result of a very natural human need to compensate for everything that yet remains unknown to him/her. So, all in all, fairly poor as a work of literature, but worth it for the sections that carefully and persuasively dissect all common notions of morality, and display both the fallacy of them as well as what they really say about the people who house them. You will not find these challenging and thought-provoking excursions in the more popular 120 Days of Sodom.
Rating:
Summary: Sade : More than meets the eye
Review: Juliette is the story of a woman who chooses resorts to vice as a means of extracting herself from the low social position typically held by women in the eighteenth century. Sade proves to be a fore-runner to Freud as a "sexologist" and "sociologist" as he describes the use of sex as a tool for domination and socialization. The debauchery of Juliette, termed "libertinage" is her way of controling men and gaining power in the society. She thus victimizes in place of being victimized, a theory worthy of comparison to Darwin's theory on survival of a species, but Juliette is ultimately a victime of herself. "Juliette" and Sade's philosophy are better understood having read "Justine or the Misfortune of Vertue" which depicts Justine, the sister of Juliette, on a similar voyage although drawing her strength from her virtuousness which ultimately renders her weak and vulnerable to an onslaught of men and women willing to take advantage of her sexually, monitarilly, and sentimentally.
Rating:
Summary: Crammed with fascinating episodes, and rich in thought.
Review: The Marquis de Sade - Juliette. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. First Complete American Edition. New York: Grove Press, 1998 (1968). 1205 pp. Donatien-Alphonse-Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), was born in Paris into one of the most noble and ancient families of Provence. He was educated at first by his uncle, the tolerant, scholarly, and sophisticated Abbé de Sade, then by the Jesuits, and at the age of twenty-three married Renee-Pelagie de Montreuil, an intelligent and loving woman who bore him three children. The marriage, as was usual at the time, was arranged, and Sade would have much preferred to marry Renee's beautiful and vivacious younger sister, Anne-Prospere, a girl he later seduced. This led to the undying enmity of his mother-in-law, the powerful Madame de Montreuil, who through her influence at court was able to obtain a 'lettre de cachet' or Royal Warrant of arrest from the king, which led to Sade's first imprisonment. A variety of sexual escapades, and Madame de Montreuil's continuing enmity, were to lead to an incredibly harsh total of twenty-seven years of imprisonment, and he was eventually to die in the Charenton lunatic asylum where he had been sent, not because he was insane, since he was one of the most lucid thinkers of his age, but after incurring the wrath of Napoleon who had been led to believe that he was the anonymous author of the anti-Bonaparte satire, 'Zoloe,' a mediocre work which current opinion feels was probably not written by Sade. What were Sade's real crimes? Well, so far as I can gather, there weren't any. He was guilty of a number of sexual indiscretions and frankly admitted to being a libertine - a man who felt that sex was something to celebrate and enjoy, and not the dirty and disgusting thing we have been taught. He also wrote a number of very profound, very obscene, very learned, and also very funny books, for what is regularly overlooked is that he was, in addition to his other talents, a great comic artist. The French critic Philippe Sollers, in fact, seems to feel that everything Sade wrote was intended as comic. And if we consider that the essence of great comedy lies in the truth of its portrayal of human nature, I think we arrive at the real reason for Sade having been demonized, imprisoned, and misrepresented as a monster - there is just too much truth in him, and society has a vested interest in suppressing the truth. An impressive array of outstanding personalities have written about Sade's work: Apollinaire, Maurice Heine, Gilbert Lely, Octavio Paz, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Yukio Mishima, Annie LeBrun, etc., and there are some who feel that if it were not for his reputation, his novel of 1795, 'Aline and Valcour,' would probably be rated every bit as highly as we rate such works as 'Don Quixote' or 'Gulliver's Travels.' Unfortunately, because in many of his works he dealt with taboo subjects in an often extreme way, and because his vision of man was less than flattering, his reputation as a libertine has been seized upon as an excuse to rigorously exclude him from him the Western literary canon, and one will search in vain for any mention of Sade in the Histories of Western Literature and Philosophy where he ought to figure prominently. This campaign of vilification and suppression has been so effective that it is possible to have a keen interest in literature and philosophy, and to read extensively for decades, without ever even suspecting that Sade is the one writer who is most worth reading since he so unique. Because of the extreme obscenity that we find in his writings they have always been a favorite target of censors, and it wasn't until the mid-sixties that unexpurgated editions of Sade's works became available in English translation in the United States. For those who would like to read the authentic texts, I can strongly recommend the present authoritative and critical English edition. It has a full introduction, critical essays, bibliographies, etc., and is beautifully translated. As a book, it's crammed with fascinating episodes and is a rich repository of Sade's thought. There are a lot of other 'Sade' books on the market, or books that pretend to be giving you Sade, but the present ediition contains the only authoritative and uncut English translations of his major works. As for earlier translations, some of them tend to be rather expensive, possibly because they have usually been issued in limited editions and book dealers have a nasty habit of classifying them as Erotica, as, in other words, "the sort of book that one reads with one hand." In fact, Sade is not not really erotically stimulating at all. My own feeling is that his descriptions of sexual high jinks are intended more to provoke laughter than to excite, and anyone who goes to him for titillation is going to come away disappointed. Roald Dahl, the famous writer of children's books, pointed out somewhere that children love the grotesque, the exaggerated, the monstrous, the ugly, the dirty; they find such things hilarious. I think there's more than a bit of this in Sade, and perhaps buried deep down in all of us too. Sade was able to see into the depths of the subconscious mind, and for anyone who is interested in understanding who and what we really are he is unsurpassed.
Rating:
Summary: Crammed with fascinating episodes, and rich in thought.
Review: The Marquis de Sade - Juliette. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. First Complete American Edition. New York: Grove Press, 1998 (1968). 1205 pp. Donatien-Alphonse-Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), was born in Paris into one of the most noble and ancient families of Provence. He was educated at first by his uncle, the tolerant, scholarly, and sophisticated Abbé de Sade, then by the Jesuits, and at the age of twenty-three married Renee-Pelagie de Montreuil, an intelligent and loving woman who bore him three children. The marriage, as was usual at the time, was arranged, and Sade would have much preferred to marry Renee's beautiful and vivacious younger sister, Anne-Prospere, a girl he later seduced. This led to the undying enmity of his mother-in-law, the powerful Madame de Montreuil, who through her influence at court was able to obtain a 'lettre de cachet' or Royal Warrant of arrest from the king, which led to Sade's first imprisonment. A variety of sexual escapades, and Madame de Montreuil's continuing enmity, were to lead to an incredibly harsh total of twenty-seven years of imprisonment, and he was eventually to die in the Charenton lunatic asylum where he had been sent, not because he was insane, since he was one of the most lucid thinkers of his age, but after incurring the wrath of Napoleon who had been led to believe that he was the anonymous author of the anti-Bonaparte satire, 'Zoloe,' a mediocre work which current opinion feels was probably not written by Sade. What were Sade's real crimes? Well, so far as I can gather, there weren't any. He was guilty of a number of sexual indiscretions and frankly admitted to being a libertine - a man who felt that sex was something to celebrate and enjoy, and not the dirty and disgusting thing we have been taught. He also wrote a number of very profound, very obscene, very learned, and also very funny books, for what is regularly overlooked is that he was, in addition to his other talents, a great comic artist. The French critic Philippe Sollers, in fact, seems to feel that everything Sade wrote was intended as comic. And if we consider that the essence of great comedy lies in the truth of its portrayal of human nature, I think we arrive at the real reason for Sade having been demonized, imprisoned, and misrepresented as a monster - there is just too much truth in him, and society has a vested interest in suppressing the truth. An impressive array of outstanding personalities have written about Sade's work: Apollinaire, Maurice Heine, Gilbert Lely, Octavio Paz, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Yukio Mishima, Annie LeBrun, etc., and there are some who feel that if it were not for his reputation, his novel of 1795, 'Aline and Valcour,' would probably be rated every bit as highly as we rate such works as 'Don Quixote' or 'Gulliver's Travels.' Unfortunately, because in many of his works he dealt with taboo subjects in an often extreme way, and because his vision of man was less than flattering, his reputation as a libertine has been seized upon as an excuse to rigorously exclude him from him the Western literary canon, and one will search in vain for any mention of Sade in the Histories of Western Literature and Philosophy where he ought to figure prominently. This campaign of vilification and suppression has been so effective that it is possible to have a keen interest in literature and philosophy, and to read extensively for decades, without ever even suspecting that Sade is the one writer who is most worth reading since he so unique. Because of the extreme obscenity that we find in his writings they have always been a favorite target of censors, and it wasn't until the mid-sixties that unexpurgated editions of Sade's works became available in English translation in the United States. For those who would like to read the authentic texts, I can strongly recommend the present authoritative and critical English edition. It has a full introduction, critical essays, bibliographies, etc., and is beautifully translated. As a book, it's crammed with fascinating episodes and is a rich repository of Sade's thought. There are a lot of other 'Sade' books on the market, or books that pretend to be giving you Sade, but the present ediition contains the only authoritative and uncut English translations of his major works. As for earlier translations, some of them tend to be rather expensive, possibly because they have usually been issued in limited editions and book dealers have a nasty habit of classifying them as Erotica, as, in other words, "the sort of book that one reads with one hand." In fact, Sade is not not really erotically stimulating at all. My own feeling is that his descriptions of sexual high jinks are intended more to provoke laughter than to excite, and anyone who goes to him for titillation is going to come away disappointed. Roald Dahl, the famous writer of children's books, pointed out somewhere that children love the grotesque, the exaggerated, the monstrous, the ugly, the dirty; they find such things hilarious. I think there's more than a bit of this in Sade, and perhaps buried deep down in all of us too. Sade was able to see into the depths of the subconscious mind, and for anyone who is interested in understanding who and what we really are he is unsurpassed.
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