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.