A review by nessa_arandur
The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade

1.0

The stories in this book are purposefully gross for the sake of being gross. Other reviewers have supplied plenty of detail as to the depths this book plumbs. Aside from the fact that it's troubling that some dude thought up all this shit, it's also tediously boring in its repetitiveness. Like, too boring to finish, thus it has ended up on my dnf shelf. This book doesn't have a hidden meaning; it's simply one disturbed individual's idea of the most fucked up "hedonism" he could think of. If anything, it was quite interesting to see how much he talks about asses in great detail, but I guess this was supposed to be the most shocking thing (among others) he could think of to display the absolute depravity of the four men. This kind of idea about gay people really doesn't hold up today and so a large part of the "shock" value of this portion was simply lost on me. The men's treatment of people as cattle and objects in the story was possibly more disturbing to me than the fact that the author thought up this crap. It harkens to actual classism that existed and still exists today, but says absolutely nothing interesting about it. I feel like there really was no point to him writing this except that he was bored out of his skull imprisoned for so long. It certainly doesn't add any value to the literary world. Maybe I watch too many serial killer videos, this book came across to me like a neatly packaged torture list for some aspiring serial killer rather than any literary marvel. Just boringly repetitive torture porn.