The Fan-Maker's Inquisition - Hardcover

Ducornet, Rikki

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805059261 ISBN 13: 9780805059267

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1999

Synopsis

Rikki Ducornet's boldest imaginative act yet-a brilliant novel about the Marquis de Sade that will forever change the way we regard one of history's most notorious men.

Picture a dramatic courtroom scene: during the French Revolution a fan-maker is on trial because of a manuscript seized in her rooms and her friendship with the Marquis de Sade, the notorious author of Justine, who has already been condemned and imprisoned by the same court for his sexual transgressions. Not only has she made exquisite and sexually provocative fans for her friend, but she has also coauthored with the Marquis a book about the infamous Spanish missionary, Bishop Landa, accusing him of massacres and other hideous abuses against the native population of the New World. The men of the court are so consumed with punishing the authors of this scandalous book that they are blinded to the folly of their own accusations against the Marquis.

The Fan-Maker's Inquisition is a novel about books and the reveries that enger them, about the intrinsic necessity of the sovereign imagination, and about the risks of passionate living and thinking.

About this title

About the Author

Rikki Ducornet lives in Denver, Colorado. She has written six novels, two short story collections, and five books of poetry. Her story collection The Word Desire (0-8050-5174-0) is available from Owl Books.

Reviews

The Marquis de Sade, notorious Frenchman and sexual libertine, makes for a sensual, irreverent and politically illuminating subject in Ducornet's (Phosphor in Dreamland) lushly imagined seventh novel. This sumptuous tale is equal parts testimonial, epistolary exchange and reminiscence, opening in 1793 with the eponymous Fan-Maker (Gabrielle) facing an unidentified interrogator from the Parisian Comit? de Surveillance, attempting to defend her friendship with Sade, who's already been condemned to prison for his sexual crimes. In addition to being accused of creating blasphemous, erotic fans for Sade, Gabrielle is also known to have collaborated with him on a denunciatory book exposing Spanish Inquisitor Bishop Diego de Landa's vicious treatment of the Mayas in the Y#catan in 1562. Landa is accused of torturing and murdering the natives of the New World and stripping the Mayas of their pagan belief system, all in the name of the Church. While it is the notorious book that immediately endangers the composed, eloquent Fan-Maker, she's also vulnerable as a known lesbian and libertine. At the Comit?'s request, she reads and explains the raging missives she's received from Sade; they are tantalizingly detailed and incendiary. The theatrical format exacerbates the polemical tone of the book, in which the excesses of French Revolutionary philistines and the Spanish Inquisition's barbarism are made exhaustively clear. In the latter half of the narrative, Sade becomes narrator, treating the reader to his perspective on the courageous Fan-Maker. He reveals the letter she composed on the eve of her execution, and he lovingly describes her devotion to Olympe de Gouges, a radical playwright and fellow victim of the Comit?. Ducornet's prose is necessarily and carefully shaded toward purple, often starkly ribald or phantasmic. She convincingly interpolates Sade's audacious, epigrammatic voice, his passion for carnal freedoms and hatred for banal taboos. Her language is an ecstatic performance, with transformational potency that begs to be read aloud. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It's been a good year for the dark and satanic Marquis, what with a major biography and translations of his short stories and letters from prisonand now this fetchingly perverted novel from America's answer to Angela Carter (and perhaps Isak Dinesen), the author of such baroque fiction as The Complete Butcher's Tales (1994) and Phosphor in Dreamland (1995). The story initially focuses on the trial of the eponymous artisan whos corresponded with Sade during his imprisonment (as an aristocrat targeted by the Revolution), provided erotically illustrated artifacts made to his order (flagellation is a favorite theme), and collaborated with him on a scurrilous little volume detailing the swath cut through the Mayan culture of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula by (Spanish) Bishop Landa, a murderous missionary resolved ``to pacify the Indians and bring them to the Light of Christ''). In the increasingly declamatory second half, Sade himself offers a witty maledictory cataloguing of his own physical failings (``teeth as untrustworthy as dice, an anus with a mind of its own) and his ego-driven espousal of unfettered freedom of expression (his wish ``to embrace the immense disorder of voluptuousness''). There's rather more detailed information about the craft of fan-making than most readers will require, and Ducornet does employ her charactersbesides Sade and fan- maker Gabrielle, her intellectual soulmate and lover, feminist playwright Olympe de Gougesas mouthpieces for the claims of individual freedom from convention and repression. But the novel is filled with amusingly irreverent stories within stories, such as Sade's miscellaneous contrary accounts of his birth and upbringing, and Bishop Landa's cautionary tale of how a disguised Satan tempted angels out of heaven, causing God to banish them and curse womankind forever. Elegant jaded entertainment. Readers who aren't immediately glutted, and persevere through the calculated blasphemies and obscenities, will gratefully savor the fruits of Ducornet's hothouse imagination. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Marquis de Sade is so monstruous that he ought to have been conjured up by a novelist. Here, an imaginative novelist does conjure up Sade. The story centers on a fan-maker whose creations for Sade depict exquisitely outrageous sex scenes. Now the Revolution has descended, Sade is in prison, and the fan-maker is on trial for her presumed part in his debauches. During the trial, it is revealed that the two have collaborated on a manuscript imputing acts of horrific torture and killing to Spanish Inquisitor Bishop Landa in South AmericaAacts of course more awful than anything Sade has dreamed up. What's more, the fan-maker has been passionately involved with the notorious Olympe de Gouges. The story is related entirely through trial transcriptions, letters, and manuscript, and though the structure cracks a little mid-way through, it's mostly a bracing and original way to tell this intriguing tale. Throughout, there's a real tension: Sade is defended for "dar[ing] to take imagination's darkest path," yet ideas are also shown to be profoundly dangerous. A thought-provoking book for sophisticated readers.
-ABarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ducornet, best known for her fabulistic plots and sensuous prose, turns her attention to the notorious libertine, the Marquis de Sade. During the French Revolution, a Parisian fan-maker is arrested and tried in court for coauthoring a manuscript with Sade that accuses Spanish Inquisitor Bishop Landa of brutalizing and massacring the native population of the New World. Her blatant indictment of a sanctioned moral figure outrages the jury committee, especially given her own notorious past: her association with the sodomite Sade, her celebrity as an artisan who decorates her fans with pornographic imagery, and her lesbian liaison with a negress. Ducornet writes part 1 in the manner of a play, inventing a dialogue between the accusing jury committee and the defiant fan-maker, who defends Sade's as well as her own intellectual position. Part 2, which takes place after the fan-maker is condemned and beheaded, presents Sade's reminiscences of their friendship and, more important, the motivation behind his work. Ducornet passionately champions Sade's cause--an unyielding fight for all manner of freedom--in this novel. As she writes through the voice of the fan-maker: "Sade's terrible book was like the key that opens Bluebeard's closet, affording a glimpse of the truth. Recall, citizen, that if what Bluebeard's bride sees terrifies her, it also frees and saves her." Veronica Scrol

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805059261
• ISBN 13: 9780805059267
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224