The Marquis De Sade - Softcover

Schaeffer, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330319612 ISBN 13: 9780330319614

Publisher: Picador, 2001

Synopsis

Even during his lifetime, the real Marquis de Sade was in danger of being subsumed by his myth, and in the two centuries since his death his name has become a synonym for perversion, brutality and desirous cruelty. Neil Schaeffer's subtle and revealing biography peels away layers of misconception and legend to reveal the complex psychology of a man who, far from being merely sadistic, was inflamed by extremes of exquisite feeling - from deep romantic love to the basest lust - and motivated by flights of paranoid delusion.In his life and writing, Sade fought the limitations of authority, morality and convention. It was an argument he would lose, paying dearly with his liberty and reputation. In this enthralling new biography Neil Schaeffer brings to life this struggle, and vividly presents to us all the contradictions and complexities of 'the devine Marquis'. 'The book leaves a powerful impression on the mind, one of immense sadness' - "Observer". 'Schaeffer's eloquent, passionate biography...restores the perverse Marquis to garish life' - "Mail on Sunday".

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Review

His immortality may be of a scandalous variety, but the fascination still exerted by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814) is evidenced in this, the third biography of the man to appear in a scant six months. Francine du Plessix Gray (At Home with the Marquis de Sade) and Laurence Bongie (Sade: A Biographical Essay) take arguably more original approaches, but American academic Neil Schaeffer's thorough, carefully researched and argued book is more likely to appeal to the general reader who knows little of Sade beyond the perversion to which he gave his name. In fact, Schaeffer contends, the marquis was hardly a textbook sadist: he liked to be beaten at least as much as he enjoyed inflicting pain, which was a pastime he pursued primarily in his books' scatological fantasies. The author generally attempts to temper Sade's dreadful reputation, placing his escapades with prostitutes and menservants in the European tradition of aristocratic libertinism and pointing up the witty irony as well as the obscenities in works like The 120 Days of Sodom ("the most radical novel ever written"). It's not exactly a pretty picture, but Schaeffer makes a plausible case that the man imprisoned by both royal and revolutionary regimes posed more danger through his unfettered imaginings than through anything he actually did. --Wendy Smith

From the Inside Flap

ginal, compellingly human portrait of the "divine Marquis," the enigmatic legend whose name is synonymous with brutal perversion and desirous cruelty.

Against a magnificently embroidered backdrop of eighteenth-century France, Neil Schaeffer reconstructs the almost incredible adventures of Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade. When he was a young man, married off against his wishes to a middle-class heiress, his insatiable sexual appetites and disdain for all forms of convention drew him into a series of scandals, first with prostitutes and then with his sister-in-law. His enraged, social-climbing mother-in-law conspired with the authorities, and the result was Sade's thirteen-year imprisonment without trial. Later, freed by the Revolution, the brilliantly protean Marquis became a revolutionary leader himself and then narrowly escaped the guillotine. But with the publication of the novels he wrote behind bars, books denounced as lewd and blasphemous, he was again imprisoned. Under

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330319612
• ISBN 13: 9780330319614
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496