(Anna S.)
Why write this? Why read this? Why put ME through the torture of reading this? Why of all works was this preserved for people to read?
All are very good questions I will never want the full answer to–mainly the first one.
While there are actually notable things within the work, such as the symbolism of the characters, or the veiws Sade gives on the church, overall, the work is essentially everything wrong with the world described in about five pages of actually somewhat notable commentary scrambled and mixed in amoungst over 300 pages of torture, rape, and murder.
Once you read something horrific, you think, it can’t get worse than that, it immediatly gets worse. On page 76 you read the phrase ” I had just turned 7″ and proceed to read a scene i honestly would feel sick describing. And you would be wrong if you think that’s the worst it can be, because a few pages later, it gets significantly worse.
I admit, I never finished, nor will I ever, because it was ultimately so disgusting I couldn’t even read what I did read in order. There is quite literally nothing you could possibly do to make me sit down and read this book for more than a page at a time due to the sheer horror the words in it create.
Amongst the kidnappings and objectification of women and children, the descriptions of ways to torture women to death ( including but not limited to stretching their limbs until they rip appart, leaving them for flies to eat, and melting one’s brains with a red hot iron ‘bonnet’), the explicit amount of detail given about acts committed against actual children, and the uncomfortable amount of human excrement, this book has ensured that I will never (and I mean never) read anything worse, so on the bright side at least I have found what I now consider the deepest low of writing in the history of ever.