This book was something else! I am unsure of whether it was purposefully funny or not but I found parts of it (read, the last five pages) absolutely hilarious. The poor Justine had the worst luck ever, and Sade makes sure that the reader understands it in a VERY graphic way. In his very graphic writing, he explores the corruption that one can find in society. The acts of libertinism are followed by long philosophical monologues that serve as explanation to the sadistic actions we saw previously taking place. Every action was accompanied by them saying that it was OK for them to do this because the world was inherently evil and (surprise surprise) virtue is useless.

It is definitely a very interesting book that I would recommend anyone reading (if you have the stomach...). He has to be one of the most interesting writers of the 18th century, and he does explain a completely unwritten part of society at the time.

No wonder the term "sadism" was coined after the Marquis de Sade. It took me forever to slog through this book, which I picked up out of curiosity (being an English lit major), thinking, "How bad could it really be? It's only an 18th century novel." I could never have believed this type of masturbatory storytelling could have existed and been published at the time, though Sade was arrested for being the author. This is a strange mixture of political, sexual, and philosophical meanderings told from the point of view of a girl determined to remain virtuous through all sorts of torture, rape, and every other kind of abuse at the hands of "libertines" and criminals because she believes she'll be rewarded by God in Heaven. Being an atheist, Sade laces the novel with plenty of religious and political irony and criticism, but those themes take a backseat to the gratuitous detailing of the sodomizing and torture Justine suffers. Her torturers continuously justify their behavior through the belief that in Nature the strong were meant to rule over the weak, so why should they care if the weak suffer? It's how Nature operates, survival of the fittest, outlined pre-Darwin. I'm not a prude, but the relentless details of Justine's "misfortunes" are hard to see as anything but Sade writing out his own disturbing sexual fantasies, which are actually derived from his own experiences which he was constantly fleeing the authorities for committing. This novel was definitely not worth the 264 pages, not even with the ironic religious and political commentary. I could appreciate the humorous stab at novels of the time that droned on about the rewards of virtue, but with this novel Sade raped and beat that idea to death and set its corpse on fire. What a creep.

I'm giving up on this one. If someone convinces me there is ANYTHING this "book" can offer, I'll then give it another try. Who on earth has put it on a classics series?

How is it possible that a girl can remember and retell pages and pages of her rapists'speeches (I swear, every monologue is 5 pages at least)? And WHY does she retell in such a detail their reasons? Couldn't she just say what happened to her in a sentence and go on with the story. Looks like she takes pleasure in retelling what happened to her.

This is the most fucked up book I've read to date. It's great writing that's for sure, but it's real fucked up.

But there's one thing for sure, I am very convinced about the misfortune of virtue.

One can only imagine De Sade cackling madly as he penned this hilarious and maybe even unintentional send-up of the self-righteous whiner. Narrated by Justine, a selfish, perpetually-stupid, "virtuous" princess-type who is shocked to find out that her beloved God is not her own personal Santa Claus, the book is rife with rants on the place of vice over virtue - some of which actually make some good points.

Mostly loved it, tired of it before the lame ending.

A romp in moral corruption. A repudiation of empathy. Relentlessly cynical.

Picaresque collection of episodes of the good girl -- Justine -- driven blow by blow down into hell by the pile driver of good intentions. Despite advice by her sister, who, in the application of one orifice after the next, has risen to the rank of Duchess, Justine, in making her way with honor and dignity, is forced into every imaginable depravity and horror.

The style in my cheesy translation is stiff. Its language is dangerously prolapsed into the comical, so cut off from its own circulation, it risks certain necrosis. .

It has rid me of hope. Broken my life's steady labor toward salvation. It has also, inexorably, given a nasty habit to an innocent reader: to become ruthlessly addicted to the seventeenth century's affection for the aperiodic sentence, tied also within its hellish knots; the pleasure, nay, not in their undoing, but in their gathering so tightly, with such completeness of purpose, as to darken whatever light may be thrown upon it; lastly, to cause, even in the most diligent reader, a fatal hesitation, and, reluctantly, with the last drop of life in its evil, thrice-damned souls, requires -- to demand, yet even to beg -- to start the sentence all over again, as, we have, alas, forgotten its beginning.

It's okay. Refreshing, but only in small quantities.

Contains Explicit Content Discretion is Advised

I should probably relate to you dear reader how I came to read Justine. About a decade ago I came across a film called Quills that was loosely based on the last years of the Marquis De Sade’s life. The film was fantastic despite the historical liberties taken and I became interested in finding out more about the Marquis and his body of work. The only piece of literature written by the Marquis featured in the film was the book Justine. The brief mentions of book by characters of the film gave me the impression that Justine was an especially kinky dirty book. As it turns out that wasn’t the case.

Justine is known as one of the infamous works written by the Marquis De Sade for good reason. It goes without saying that a person from the 1700s and myself from 2019 wouldn’t remotely agree on big moral issues but one thing we would agree on is that this book is worth getting upset over. The plot concerns a teenage French girl named Justine who has been orphaned and cast out into the street. She parts with her sister Juliette immediately because Juliette would like to join the world’s oldest profession to avoid starvation and Justine endeavors to be virtuous no matter the cost. Over the course of the next fifteen years Justine proceeds to run afoul of every depraved sadistic fetishistic pervert in the country of France.

The novel consists of Justine being employed and/or imprisoned by a man or men (who are all walking talking arguments for human extinction) who proceed to violate Justine in pretty much every way imaginable. I would describe these sections of the book as pornographic only in the technical sense because I honestly can’t conceive of human with a working ethical compass being aroused by them. Almost every segment consists of rape and/or sexual assault in addition to an especially brutal type of sadism. Please understand that this book doesn’t even slightly conform to even the most extreme forms of BDSM because that practice is all about the consent of both parties and any damage done by spanking, riding crops, or other implements amounts to some slight redness of the skin with no lasting harm. Justine is brutally beaten on multiple occasions with nearly fatal consequences. These interludes often include the pervert/sadist of the chapter lecturing Justine on philosophical arguments which mirror those of the Marquis De Sade. What’s incredibly vexing to me about these lectures is that some of the time I find my self being in perfect agreement with Sade. For instance, Sade points out that Nature doesn’t share 1700s French Societies’ disgust with homosexuality and anal sex and doesn’t have our hang ups concerning virginity and therefore neither should we. Sade also has several pointed criticisms to make about religion which I happen to agree with. However, Sade also makes several of these arguments based on half-truths and faulty logic which amount to the following:
*The Church and State kill people to further their own ends. Why shouldn’t I be allowed too?
*A person should follow their nature. A murderer is only following his nature by killing.
Needless to say, I don’t agree.

The novel’s thematic through line seems to be that following virtue is self-defeating and pointless while following vice is beneficial and natural. While I would never agree with that assessment, if an author genuinely wanted to write a novel with that message, he should feel free to do so provided he meets two requirements. Firstly, the story should support your theme. Secondly, your thematic through line should be present throughout the whole work. Sade fulfills neither of these requirements. Sade would like to reader to think that Justine’s misfortunes are due to her being virtuous when in reality her troubles are due to her being unlucky (I’ve run over black cats that were luckier than this woman) and her being plain stupid. On at least two occasions Justine calls out sexual abusers for their behavior and is immediately assured by said abuser that said abuse will not continue for whatever reason. Guess what happens. At one point in the novel Justine is forced to participate in a murderous rogue’s multiple auto erotic asphyxia sessions when she is commanded to cut the rope and revive him once he’s “finished”. This is the same man that’s explicitly said he has killed eighty women that were formerly in Justine’s shoes and intendeds to do the same to her once Justine is of no more use to him. If Justine just did nothing she could escape from a horrible situation and rid the world of a scumbag. She didn’t put the rope around the guy’s neck and make him step off the stool, he did both voluntarily. Justine isn’t culpable in the slightest. But she cuts him down every time anyway. Justine is dangerously naïve at best and possibly mentally defective at worst because throughout her Job like torment over the course of the book she is either unwilling or unable to learn from her own mistakes. If you’ve relied on the suspect-at-best kindness of strangers for the umpteenth time and it results in horrible outcome for you, after a certain point you’re partly to blame.

What compounds the first issue is that Sade chickens out on his own theme. The book climaxes in a courtroom with Justine framed for murder. She relates her entire misbegotten story to the court and wouldn’t you know it, the judge’s mistress who happens to be in the courtroom is Justine’s sister Juliette. Justine is found innocent on all counts thanks to her sister and is taken in by Juliette and the judge who both intend to give her the most comfortable life possible in an attempt to make up for some of her suffering. Shortly thereafter Justine is literally hit by lightning. But don’t feel too bad, I’m pretty sure dying was the nicest thing that ever happened to this woman. If the book ended right there with Justine’s death or ended even earlier with Justine being put to death for murder she didn’t commit, Sade’s thematic through line would be intact. But the story goes on for another page with Juliette and the judge being moved by her Justine’s death, renouncing their sinful ways, and joining religious orders. The last paragraph of the book even talks of goodness being rewarded, evil punished, and that it’s never to late to repent. Even if I didn’t know that Sade was an avowed atheist or that the rest of his fictional works (except for Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man) practically drip with Hedonistic Nihilism, I still wouldn’t buy Sade’s supposed message at the end of the book. He enjoys portraying the violence that befalls Justine and the atheistic villain’s intellectual browbeating of her a bit too much for me to find any believability in his ending. Justine and its sequel/parallel Juliette were published anonymously by Sade because he rightly feared reprisal from the censors at the time. This tacked on ending smells to me like a last-ditch effort to claim the book had a good message. Considering Sade was arrested for writing both books and locked in an asylum for the rest of his life, I’m guessing it didn’t work.

Something else that rubs me the wrong way about Justine is that I’ve read a somewhat similar book that is infinitely better, Voltaire’s Candide. The novel follows the titular Candide and his friends on a similar Job like journey to Justine. The book was written solely to mock Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s claim that the world we live in is “the best of all possible worlds”. Throughout the story Candide and company go through horrible disaster after horrible disaster in a chaotic unforgiving world and by the time the book ends Leibniz’s philosophical claim is utterly shattered. But what makes Candide superior overall isn’t only the genuine humor and likable characters but the superior flow of the story. Candide and his friends get into various forms trouble at every corner but somehow always manage to find a way out of it with brief respites after every encounter. As opposed to Justine, where the heroine only to find herself in danger almost immediately after which leaves no room for the reader to breath. Said danger is also always the same. Justine runs into a creepy pervert. Whereas Candide’s protagonists encounter an earthquake, religious zealots, a storm at sea, pirates, cannibalism, and more. The variety is exceedingly more entertaining. Voltaire also keeps his theme throughout the entire book by mocking Leibniz’s philosophy at every possible opportunity and having Candide abandon the philosophy himself by the stories end. Although it’s up for debate what philosophy/ideology Voltaire thinks the protagonists should follow if any, the theme of the book is kept intact.

Justine is never boring and mercifully short but it isn't a good book. Justine has joined the pantheon of the worst books I’ve ever read. This book is for the morbidly curious only.