Rating: 
Summary: Waste of time, complete unadulterated garbage.
Review: This book is boring, and completely a waste of time. Anybody who praises this is out of touch. Praise is best saved for well written books with exciting plotlines, irregardless of the content. This book, even with all the horridly disgusting, very impossible tales removed, would still be a waste of time. The first 1/4 of the book, actually has some thought into the reasoning behind atrocites such as fecal eating and mutalation of very young children (very digusting I might add). The final 3/4 have all the reasoning removed, and begins to appear to be a point-form pathetic display of various horrors, without rhyme or reason. This book treats children like urinals and fecal matter like food. Just think of something disgusting in your head and write it on a piece of paper, that's how much thought De Garbage put into this waste of time. Save yourself some time, and save the world some corruption by burning this piece of garbage, all it serves is a basis for ideas for criminals, as anyone with half an ounce of sanity realizes its horribly written and childish in nature. De Sade, rot in hell you piece of human waste.
Rating:
Summary: worse than nasty + perverse...it's boring + poorly-written
Review: don't even waste your time trying to read this one. i always thought..."the marquis de sade...oh no, it's a great writer who writes about horrible subjects." well, i was half right...his subject matter is horrible and nasty, but it's unreadable. his ability as a story-teller is perhaps only slightly better than his mental health.it's bad writing by a sick guy. i think he would even have trouble getting hired to write for dirty porn mags...
Rating: 
Summary: Sade's Masterpiece
Review: I wanted to contribute a review to correct some of the impressions readers may have gotten from other customers' reviews of 120 Days of Sodom. First of all, I do regard 120 Days as a masterpiece -- Sade's only masterpiece, and a dazzling contribution to world literature. I will spend the rest of this review hopefully providing 120 Day's future readers some keys to appreciate this mammoth, peculiar novel. 120 days is shocking, horrifying -- disgusting. This is pretty well universally agreed upon. This in itself says quite a lot. We live in a world where "shocking" has lost much of its meaning. Yet the Marquis De Sade continues to shock our jaded, supposedly unshockable sensibilities; if we want to read this book well, it's worth asking ourselves why. As Simone De Beauvoir says in her introduction to this edition, Sade was a good novelist -- and a great moralist. One thing Sade definitely was not was a proselytizer for sexual freedom. The recent move "Quills" -- while not completely misleading on this point -- was still much too frivolous, too much of a French sex comedy ( and also too traditionally heterosexual ) to reflect the Sadean universe. Sade is not Henry Miller; with him, sexual freedom is not an issue. Power is. The powerful are sexually free. Sex interests Sade far less than pleasure, and pleasure for Sade can't exist without squashing the weak. An exemplar of the Sadean universe might be the Michael Douglass character from "Wall Street" except that now he knows that sex, even above money, is the ultimate fantasy thrill of power. In other words, they coined the word "sadism" after him for good reasons! 120 Days is not only the story of four men who act out their sick, abusive fantasies, but of four men who employ storytellers to "entertain" them -- with stories describing every sexual variation conceivable. The stories are valued by the degree to which they explore the relationship between sexuality and crime. The curiosity is that, although his books disgust us -- particularly when we first start to read --Sade isn't particularly graphic. I can think of books with incomparably more explicit depictions of sex and violence -- for example "American Psycho". The difference is that in books like "American Psycho" or films like "Kids" the corruption is viewed from a distance; the author doesn't approve of what happens, he merely "shows it like it is." This is not Sade's attitude at all. He is a cheerleader for the horrors and excesses of vice. I read a review recently that compared Sade to rap music. The reviewer jokingly insinuated that Sade was the eighteenth century equivalent of Ice-T. This, too, is untrue. Rap music generally makes a rather moral case. Rap artists posture to their audience as members of an underprivileged society who justify their misogamy/criminality by denouncing the brutal conditions imposed upon them. Sade justifies his cruelty by invoking Nature -- nature made me this way. Moreover, if you look at how the world works, you will see that nature sides with the powerful. Nature encourages us to satisfy ourselves by stepping on others. This is what Sade says. In short, 120 Days isn't just a succession of shocking scenes, which many contemporary books are -- it is an intellectual justification of a philosophy of vice. Be prepared. "That which does not kill us makes us stronger," said Nietzsche. I lastly want to emphasize why I believe a book like 120 Days has a positive value. I know this sounds strange -- particularly before you have experienced the sweeping lyricism, the ferocity of Sade's prose, the intensity of his passions, the obstinacy of a vision that few adults could sustain, and a rare children articulate -- but I believe it. Sade makes the best case that has yet been given for cruelty, if you will, evil. If his arguments weren't skillful, 120 Days would be an exercise in futility. Sade is like a nasty child, who miraculously possesses the intellect as well as the shamelessness to defend his behavior rationally. Sade succeeds as an artist if his vision strikes us as sensible within its own terms, as bizarrely accurate, or at least well-observed. He tempts us toward the abyss of cynicism. Yet for me personally reading 120 Days was a liberating and even religious experience. It was like having my worst fears articulated -- and there was a sense of liberation in the aftermath of that. Sade has done humanity a favor by visualizing hell. In a bizarre way, by describing the worst we could perpetuate, he also gives us a vision of the divine we cannot live up to. If you take 120 Days and invert it, you would have a vision of heaven, the divine in ourselves we believe in solely by faith -- but which escapes the capacities of words. Sade truly writes with an uncanny purity; of absolutes, absolute evil and, by implication, of innocence.This is why he is so often referred to as the Divine Marquis.
Rating: 
Summary: a naughty fairy tale; real life is far more horrifying...
Review: I found this book to be rather obvious in it's intentions. De Sade uses graphic descriptions of torture and sexual abuse to promote his philosophical agenda. Kind of like bait and switch, he ensnares the average(albeit disgusted) reader with nauseating scenes while out of view there is something far more sublime going on....Frankly, I enjoyed some of the sexual stuff, and I must admit I became rather aroused at times. I BELIEVE THIS TO BE DE SADE'S PRIMARY OBJECTIVE with this work.Considering the reaction this book caused, I think I am not the only person to feel this way.
Rating:
Summary: the most horrible thing ever imagined
Review: dear god! i had heard that this book was notriously sick and outrageous. i just figured "okay, it's gonna be a little rough." but i had no idea! take the most awful image in your mind and read about it and things that are actually worse. some parts left me quesy, and some of it made me feel like crying. de sade has written about [all sorts of sexualsituations]. If you [like] the freaky stuff by all means enjoy this little "treasure". but if you're like me, a curious 16 year old boy, stay away. fight the temptation because this will haunt you till the day you die. did i mention it's over 400 pages long?
Rating: 
Summary: A lot more real then you think
Review: I read 'Justine' in the late 1960s and thought it was pretty far out. "120 Days" is sure filled with a lot of sickening events, especially the 'bathroom' scenes. Don't forget all of this was done during the 1700s when Torture, Rape and Murder was a lot more common. I imagine the Count saw a lot of this during his "stay" in prison, so he simply wrote what came to his head, adding a lot of so-called "fantasy" which is practised by more then a few people today. When you read this book a few times, you discover that there was a lot of reason for this type of "diversion" as written by Simone de Beauvoir in the Foreword. Krafft-Ebing had nothing on De Sade, a lot can be learned from this type of behavior. Some parts of "120 days" are quite humorous in a sick way. If one could recreate some of the "events" with good art work, there would be long lines at the book stores and art galleries.
Rating: 
Summary: *Yawn* ZZZZZ (snore)
Review: Mildly shocking at first, it rapidly becomes just plain tiresome. The obvious question: why did de Sade write this? Answer: he had a pathological hatred of religion. This novel isn't aimed at the common man. It's aimed at the priests of his time. He wanted to make them froth at the mouth with his militant atheism and nihilism. Yet, sadly, he's mostly boring. As a nihilist, de Sade believed man was no better than a cockroach. Hence there is no morality--anything goes! Although in his life de Sade could be a compassionate man (although he was a bisexual sadomachist) everything else he wrote about, he only wrote about. He never did it. Little known is that de Sade was one of the founders of modern leftism. Ultimately this is what he will be remembered for. Besides that, the rest of his writings are just crude quasi-pornography.
Rating:
Summary: 120 days of sodom
Review: I was surprised at how graphic and inventive this book was. Marquis De Sade had a great imagination. Some criticize the way it simply lists the sadistic sex acts at some points in the book, but I think that's what De Sade was going for; inventive perversion without anything else to get in the way, or take the reader's mind off of it.
Rating:
Summary: 120 Days of Sade-om (or Saddam?)
Review: Even the Devil himself would decline to play Devil's Advocate for this book. The most Satanic work in print, this (rough draft) book tells of an imprisoned man's attempts to break out of jail through his self-officiated ejaculations. An unending litany of blasphemy, insanity, pain and rage, Sade quickly deteriorates to no more than a Spanish Inquisition dungeon filled with impersonal strips of skin strewn about as though someone might discover personal identity by covering themselves in human remains. Sade is mostly significant as an unheard cry of protest (as Blake's Prophetic Books) against the brutal French tyranny circa the Revolution, the Revolution that thought capital punishment and harsher enforcement would reform (without deforming) society. Unfortunately law does not change criminals, but criminals change the law.
Rating:
Summary: Suprisingly interesting book of absolute horror.
Review: `120 Days of Sodom' is absolutely horrific and yet at the same time quite fascinating. Some reviewers have said that this book is totally offensive and disgusting while others have said that it's fairly tame and uninteresting. Both of these opinions are valid. The story is similar in structure to Boccacio's `Decameron' or Chaucer's `Canterbury Tales' in that a series of stories are told sometimes in humourous fashion. In `120 Days', four prostitutes are recruited to gather a collection of young boys and girls to travel with four "libertines" to an impenetrable fortress where these stories will be told. Each whore relates tales for 30 days. After the days' stories are complete, the four "heroes" (as Sade describes them) act out some of what they've heard on the hapless children or just about anybody who happens to be near by to sometimes fatal consequences. The 1st set of misadventures describes fairly tame perversions while the 4th details rather attrocious murderous sexual acts. The interesting thing about `120 Days' is that it's basically only in draft format. The 2nd and 3rd months are merely lists of the evil deeds while the 1st is in laborious detail and the last is only slightly fleshed out. It would have been fascinating if Sade had been able to edit it to a final copy. As it turns out, he thought it was lost when he was released from the Bastille (where he wrote it on a single scroll). He thought it was destroyed and never saw it again during his lifetime. The `120 Days' while repetitive in many ways after the first few days of storytelling is fascinating in how evil of a character Sade could create. The debauchery, torture, mutilations, murders, etc. slowly build to a crescendo which I found to be particularly disturbing. The other stories in this volume are really quite entertaining in a very dark way (especially "Ernestine"). The essay by Simone de Bouvoir ("Should we burn Sade?") is especially adroit in addressing the typical "Sade was a misogynist" commentary and provides an interesting philosophical study on his body of work. This translation is surprisingly fluid and definitely a recommended read for any who have an interest in Sade. I find it particularly fascinating that `120 Days' was written in 1787. Fascinating in that I never see this on many banned book lists (while `Farenheit 451' and `The Grapes of Wrath' routinely are "outlawed"). Also, if you're not easily easily shocked and are looking for a "challenge", then you may want to try this one on for size.
| 
