The 120 Days of Sodom

A dark controversial tale, bound to make you cycle through every emotion possible from titillation to abject horror. Not for the faint of heart or easily offended.

1/4 of the work is unedited, what is supposed to be 3/4 of it is an outline. The language is not artful, it's repetitive, reads like a laundry list of everything horrible that you may do to someone and in the outline literally so. The characters are given superficial characteristics, they are with no personality whatsoever. The philosophy in this is minimal and if its meant to be a commentary it is only showing one side of the topic. The characters assume that they can only get off with the acts they perform in this experiment, propose that virtue is suffering and makes the pp cold even tho what they do in it can equally do that. This scroll explores the biggest depravities as it claims at the start, but it's executed in a way that it encourages you to take joy in them, the author even recommends to try some stuff out. It is a bit hard to tell whether he was a criminal since he was arrested in 1700s and the stuff he was accused of was “sodomy”, he could have been falsely accused, but the way this book was written makes me think he did, in fact, do a lot of those acts in the scroll and that he was in fact a criminal.

I don't know, but he might not like church :DDD Justine seems the main anti-church book tho.

The penguin introduction explains interesting origins of the work and the impact this writer had. It sets it up not as something to be taken literally, but rather as a study of cruelty, tho pretty sure that for the author it was wank matterial while only other authors applied it to study what we now know as sadism. Thanks Sade? I started reading “The Second Sex” before reading it, and I wasn't suprised Simone defended this book, of course she did. I learned about libertines from researching about her and then somehow got to reading “this”.

For some reason this haunted me and I read it quite quickly. Why. My mood was ruined and I think I need to reevaluate as to why I get drawn to horrific things or horror in general. I think this work will make me more careful and rightfully distrustful of certain kinds of people. I definetely got a shock that was described in the introduction, hope it leads to something.

I viewed Sodom and Gomorrah as these cool towns slain by God for no reason, but now whenever I look at the word Sodom I will probably remember this scroll at least a little. Not sure what to make of that.

I read it so you don't have to. Seriously don't waste your time .

Okay so here's the thing. I read this because of a few reasons. 1. It is considered be a national treasure of France 2. It is constantly listed as one of the most horrifying books people have ever read

Yes this book is disgusting and made my skin crawl and made me hate humanity. Yes I understand this book is a rough draft and was written while the author was imprisoned at the Bastille. Yes it supposed to shed light on the darkest parts of the human mind.

Considering all of this, the book is still BAD. The writing doesn't make sense in most places and where is does make sense it is equally boring as it is disgusting.

C'mon France you can do better about picking your national treasures. Page after page of people eating shit and a terrible writing doesn't deserve all this attention. Be better.