She spends her time woefully lamenting the depravities visited upon her (of which there are many) and preaching to everyone she encounters about religion and piousness. Justine is an incredibly naive character, and she is clearly meant to be irritating in her stubborn devotion to purity at all costs. Despite the obviously old timey language used in the prose by today’s standards, de Sade was clearly a very good writer and it is really fascinating to see such an example of erotic, angst and horror content from the 1700s. Like watching a train wreck, the story was quite gripping in a morbid kind of way. She has clearly the worst kind of luck imaginable, and the story has absolutely no spark of or hope of happiness, but she tells her tale in such a way as to make it impossible not to wonder what kind of horrors she will encounter next.
It is told in first person by Justine, as she recounts to her listeners all of her life’s woes and troubles, and each misfortune that befalls her one after the other since she was a child up to her early 30s. De Sade’s style was quite punchy and quick paced, and full of the kind of drama and angst that makes one immediately invested. I found myself shortly unable to put it down when I began to read. Whatever else the book may be, it is very well written and absolutely captivating. A grueling book to get through, especially from today’s standards, it is a surreal peak into the mind of a man who truly did believe that to indulge evil was the better path and that virtue is nothing more than foolish naivety. Both novels are ethical philosophy dissertations on the nature of mankind and morality, interspersed with the kinds of sexual atrocities for which de Sade was most well known. Justine is part one of a two part series, and its sister volume Juliette follows the inverse premise as the first. His more well known work, 120 Days of Sodom, was written while he was imprisoned in the Bastille, and is an even more gruesome and debauched tome than is his earlier work Justine.
Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue also known as Good Conduct Well Chastised, is a novel by the infamous Donatien Alphonse François, known more famously as the Marquis de Sade, from whom we get the words sadism and sadist. Warnings: violence, rape/noncon, torture, incest, underage sex, child abuse, pregnancy, misogyny, homophobia, scat The truth of virtues is the other-way-round to her it depicts the persistent battle between good and evil. Mainly the book is about the sufferings of Justine, the protagonist and her sister Juliette who benefits herself through dissipation. Justine is a story of two sisters, Justine and Juliette who have been thrown out of an orphanage.
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