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.