Do You like book The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel Of The Marquis De Sade (2000)?
“Lady Rabelais” I once heard reported that it was said by someone who might know. It wasn’t Gazelle ; but, like how! it is most clearly, most certainly found in The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition. And let me say it like this, it would almost seem as though Ducornet is plagiarizing the old man ; which would be the highest compliment. In addition to a strong presence of the satirical Swift and the encyclopedia-ist Diderot, we find in the second portion of our diptych, the titular Marquis de Sade, who is, like Rabelais, nearly plagiarized in these pages ;; and what is so pleasing to this male-isticly=oriented reader is that our Lady Rabelais is not taking the bludgeon to this quartet of male=authorhood, I mean these four progenitors of fiction=simpliciter, but is speaking the Truth of this quartet which is libertine and liberatory and enlightenment and egalitarian and emancipatory (that’s five!) -- welcome to the sacred halls of the Abbey of Thélème -- even if those four old codgers didn’t know it at the time. I stick in this tired question of gender because there was that moment, but only a moment, when I said, Rikki, stop your damn preaching ; but then, four lines after having mumbled that complaint under my breath, my breath left me because, this wasn’t “preaching”, this was conjuring the text of de Sade ; the very thing her book is._____________Often times people ask me, they ask me, “N.R.” ; “N.R.”, what do you mean by “Rabelasian”? Take as a fer-instance the following passage of pure pantagruelian pleasure, perhaps plagiarized :: Sparkling clean, they return to their tasks with renewed purpose and vigor: quartering cows, skewering birds, scaling fish, glazing onions, threading cranberries, boiling jams, stirring tripe, stuffing geese, slicing pies, truffling goose liver, braising brains, tendering soufflés, jellying eggs, shucking oysters, pureeing chestnuts, larding sweetbreads, crumbling fried smelts, grinding coffee, building pyramids of little cheeses, filling puff pastry with cream, steaming artichokes, dressing asparagus, breading cutlets, making anchovy butter and frangipane and little savory croustades, gutting crabs preparing cuckoos and thrushes in pies and cucumbers in cream, icing pineapples, lining tarlet tins with pastry dough, larding saddle of hare.... He also asked me to draw for him a number of gastronomic maps. That is not “sensuous prose”, that’s pure pantagruelism. Not having read Rabelais is, in my never humble opinion, like not having read Shakespeare. Get on with it, good people.
—Nathan "N.R." Gaddis
"We admire nature's variety and accept the flowers in their multiplicity of colors; indeed, if all flowers were white, we'd love them less. The world is richer for Nature's permutations, so why, tell me, do we not accept diversity within our own species?"I filled pages in my notebook with quotes from this book, a novel of the Marquis de Sade. The first part takes place in the format of, yes, an inquisition of a fan-maker, confidant, and writing partner of Sade's, as well as excerpts from the book they are writing. The fan-maker is also a lesbian, whose relationship with Sade draws attention to her relationship with her lover, a playwright already being watched by the Inquisitors of the French Revolution. The second part is richly layered with Sade's first person voice, the fan-maker's last letter to him, snippets of their book, and Sade's imaginings of what their persecutors are saying about it and them.A brilliant novel, Ducornet touches on intolerance, the persecution and torture of others who are different, as well as censorship in this slim gem. I also think Ducornet is perhaps showing Sade in a different light, claiming he is misunderstood and can't be guilty of crimes he committed only in his head and on paper. "....a man, I say, has the intrinsic right to imagine. If they wanted to keep me from dreaming nightmares, they should not have locked me up! The less one acts, the more one imagines, and that is the truth."In addition, Ducornet illustrates how the book is a conversation only between an author and a reader, and how that conversation will be different among different readers. "A book is a private thing, citizen, it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good."As, indeed, the greatest evil and the greatest good exists within each of us. We just have to choose which is stronger.
—Venessa
Prudish Inquisition Becomes Immersive ExquisitionRikki Ducornet opens this novella with testimony by Sade’s fan-maker, Gabrielle: "A fan is like the thighs of a woman. It opens and closes." But it's also like a book or a mind. They too can be opened or closed. And the life of Sade was very much about one open mind opposed to many closed ones. This book is designed to open (if not blow) our minds and free our imaginations. Ducornet quotes Mallarme: "There is no explosion except a book."Sade’s renowned cruelty or sadism is not the principal focus of the story. It actually humanizes Sade and two women who might have featured directly or indirectly in his life: Gabrielle, perhaps a fictional creation, who made erotically-illustrated fans for Sade to give to his whores and mistresses; and Olympe de Gouges, Gabrielle’s lesbian lover, as well as a real life playwright, political agitator and feminist (she wrote "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen", only to be guillotined on 2 November 1793 for the crime of her sexuality). (view spoiler)[Ironically, French women didn't obtain the right to vote until 1945, only four years before Simone de Beauvoir published "The Second Sex". (hide spoiler)]
—Ian Agadada-Davida