The Fan-Maker's Inquisition : A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Rating:
Summary: interesting, well-written, and ultimately empty
Review: "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition" is an exploration of the thoughts and passions of the Marquis de Sade through letters and journal entries written during his imprisonment and a transcript of the fan-maker's trial. Its prose is lush and its topics various, flowing from page to page in vivid succession. As a series of words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, the book is a marvelous success.

But as a story, it's a dismal failure. There is no discernible plot. The book cowritten by Sade and the fan-maker (interspersed in sections throughout) - without a doubt the most engaging, and easiest to follow, component of this novel - is too thinly spread to be memorable and bears too little relationship to the rest of the story to resonate meaningfully with it. The remainder - pages and pages - is comprised largely of lists of hedonistic pleasures, primarily food and sexual escapades. While this is certainly believable as the preoccupation of an imprisoned Sade, it makes for unexciting reading.

On its jacket, and in its other reviews, "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition" is billed as a revolution in thought, in the art of thinking and living passionately. It certainly has the beginnings of such an accomplishment, with its deft use of words, its vivid descriptions, and its wide range of subject matter (its purview includes, besides food and sex, religion, the settlement of the Americas, and the crafting and uses of fans). But without a plot, and a definitive ending, the book languishes in its own excessive use of ideas.

Rating:
Summary: "Fan-Maker" Will Win Fans
Review: Ducornet is an excellent writer, and this book is clear proof that she's one we'll have to watch for in coming years. What distinguishes this from the pack is her clear grasp of De Sade's thinking, and an amazing knack of making a pastiche of his style. The parts told in his voice really do sound like him. The fan-maker herself is a less well-defined character, but you find yourself believing her feisty responses to the dullwitted Revolutionary tribunal. All the prejudices, pretensions and illogicalities of the French Revolution are paraded in this short, but remarkably well-constructed book. The fan-maker, her lover and De Sade represent freedom, while the parallels between the Revolution and the Inquisition's behavior in Central America are clearly drawn, in splendidly gory fashion. Not for the timid or puritanical, but you won't read a better-written 'historical' novel this year.

Rating:
Summary: Stylistically difficult to read...
Review: The style of the book took some getting used to, but the actual story is pretty interesting.

A female fan-maker in Revolutionary France befriends the ever-licentious Marquis de Sade, and makes fans with "provacative scenes" depicted on them. The whole story is told in an interrogation setting, when the fan-maker is on the stand in court testifying about her relationship with the Marquis.