The real Marquis de Sade

By Andrew Hussey

The Marquis de Sade is one of those few writers who have given the world an adjective. The problem is that this has become a kind of shorthand: without reading Sade everybody presumes to know what he is all about. It is only when you pay close attention to his work that you begin to understand that his writing is not erotica, not even really pornography, but something else much more monstrous, grotesque and nightmarish.

His masterpiece was “The 120 Days of Sodom”, which has just been published as a Penguin Classic for the first time. It is a compendium of murder, torture and sexual crimes which tests the limits of the human imagination. This is not an easy book to read; its viciousness is occasionally breathtaking. But what really threatens to break the reader’s nerve is the overwhelming atmosphere of claustrophobia. Sade is in this sense Kafkasque – not just the Kafka of “The Trial” or “The Castle” but also of “The Penal Colony”, a world ruled by cruelty and evil, where all hope of redemption or release is impossible.