Here is what I wonder on my worst days: If the guillotine exemplifies Nature--perpetual, blind, deadly, inescapable-- and if Man is Her servant, and the Revolution too, then there is no hope. Then would I, and gladly, see the universe perish.

My humble gratitude extends to Samadrita. This was such a welcome detour. The Fan-Maker's Inquisition wrestles with moral hypocrisy. How sound that is in these uneven times. My best friend was recently interviewed on Al-Jazeera about the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. It was a very polite interview and I sat champing, hoping that mention would be made of satire from Sade to Godard. It didn't occur.

Ducornet's novel alternates between the caustic and the sumptuous and remains truly remarkable. The novel is a pastiche of sorts, encompassing court proceedings, personal letters, dreams and a fantastic book of the imagination.
( )

It is a surprise and a shame that I had not encountered this novel earlier, only learning of it recently through a post on Dennis Cooper's blog. Ducornet weaves an incendiary and narrative around the time, place, and character of the Marquis de Sade that is brimming with eroticism, poetry, and critiques of historical powers and the hypocrisy of moral dogma. She magnificently captures the spirit and voice of de Sade while at the same time unleashing the originality and depth of her own imagination.. Like the beautifully detailed and lurid fans it describes, this novel is an exquisite artwork that evokes both alluring and horrible images. ( )

3.5/5

'Luckless is that country in which the symbols of procreation are held in horror!' [de Bergerac] wrote, 'while the agents of destruction are revered!'

I've said it in other reviews, and I'll say it again: erotica deserves to be treated seriously as a legitimate genre of literature, for the amelioration of both written word and resulting reality. Sade died two hundred years ago, and while I don't know about the rest of the world, I have four words for the gun-happy, sex-patriarchal US: grow the fuck up.

When I say Sade looms over my horizon, I do not imply such in the pubescent sense, or at least not fully. There's a reason why this man's highly contentious works have survived and even thrived, ideas proliferating with every page turned that span from religion to morality to psychology and all, of course, in the midst of copious amounts of fucking whose unorthodoxy still makes the 21st century 'desensitized' mind flinch. Sadism, anyone? There's also the matter of works both erotica and classic, a paradox if there ever was one that, for all the insipid mewlers and pukers running around the B&N racks these days, manage to persist. Almost as if there was something to be gained for reading them.

Perhaps I am hasty in passing judgment with nothing but a few bits and piece and this particular book having passed through my cranium, but. While I'm not going to go as far as saying Sade was a feminist (see [b:The Sadeian Woman|276751|The Sadeian Woman And the Ideology of Pornography|Angela Carter|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1309285535s/276751.jpg|520459] for that), if the juicier ideas of Ducornet's adhere to the lines of the original Marquis' thinking, I feel I'm going to like him. There's nothing I like more than a thinker who gives no shits for general principles that are not of their own making, and if Sade truly does turn the hypocrite convention that cries morality in one ear and whispers rape culture (along with so many other rage-inducing idiocies)in the other on its head and inside out, well. We may have something here.

I'm spending a lot of time building this person up, one who neither authored nor plays main fiddle for this work being reviewed, because for the first time I'm excited about reading Sade. Morbid curiosity and a 'bring it on' mentality are all very well, but Ducornet's words have made me also want to say:

They say he is evil incarnate and that his books are a plague, but I have survived the torment, the tedium, and the exhilaration of the reading that, to tell the truth, gives me the courage to live unfettered a vivid and moral life.

Thank you, Ducornet, for spurring me on after years of meaning-to-read-but-never-managed. 2014's going to be fun.

Early in our friendship, Sade said I had the mind of a man. That was to say I was fearless, fearless of ideas, which, after all, are mere abstractions until put to use. I told him that I had the mind of a woman, adequately stimulated, adequately served.

( )

So I have never reviewed a book that I have not finished but this time I will. The book reads well and it flows along smoothly but I am a third of the way into the book and set it aside to read other books. Why? Because I have yet to come across the conflict. So far it reads like a diary with no hook to keep the reader turning the pages. So the main character is on trial, big deal. She has not appeared concerned by this matter so why should I be. Maybe one day I will pick the book back up to finish it because I hate to not finish a book I started but other books will draw my attention first. I gave this book two stars because the dialog is well written and the stories aren't bad, they just aren't good either. ( )

This novel is a rara avis, a strange, lyrical bird that is by turns beautiful and grotesque. The Fan Maker of the title is being tried before the French court, and if she is convicted, she will be beheaded.
What is the charge? Apparently, her friendship with the infamous, imprisoned Marquis de Sade, her lesbianism, her luxuriance and libertinage. The Fan Maker makes marvelous fans, often pornographic in design, and often designed as theatrical puzzles. She defends her life before the tribunal, even as the Marquis sits in prison, fuming and bleeding the violent prose that she has assisted him in writing- a fictional account of a religious zealot cleric who has gone to the new world to "cleanse" it and himself of "evil".
An interesting peek into the French Revolutionary world and political moral dichotomy, as well as the baroque debauchery within the mind of deSade (as interpreted here by Ducornet). Note: no original deSadeian text is at work here. ( )