Warner’s research and extensive interviews help him shuttle across centuries to depict remarkable characters ... The Curse of the Marquis de Sade is nevertheless more demure than one might expect. Warner’s narrative tracks the scroll across centuries but never really delves into its content ... The absence of readings like this in Warner’s book is unfortunate because the enigma surrounding a manuscript’s value — the ballooning price of a brittle scroll bearing an infamous but rarely read novel — is his story’s major theme. As disputes over the scroll intensify in the book, readers might wonder why we value anything.
Spanning hundreds of years and multiple countries, The Curse of the Marquis de Sade is impressive in scope. Warner admirably keeps all the storylines moving, and a list of characters included at the beginning of the book is a helpful reminder of who’s who in each timeline ... Warner excels at explaining Lhéritier’s complex — and possibly criminal — business operations in easy-to-understand language. And his depiction of France’s lively rare-manuscript community is a fascinating look at a largely hidden subculture ... at times feels disjointed and fragmented, with chapters jumping 100 years forward in the timeline and then back again. The shifting chronology creates a sense of mystery but can also make for a somewhat confusing reading experience. Still, given the breadth of the book’s subject matter, Warner admirably ties his three storylines together...
The journey of the scroll makes up 1 of 3 overlapping narratives in The Curse of the Marquis de Sade; it parallels a biography of Sade’s life, with a catalog of his repeated arrests and imprisonments for blasphemy, sodomy, and rape. These depravities, in turn, are interspersed with a third narrative, subtitled 'The Empire of Letters,' which follows the scroll in recent decades, when an entirely different form of lawlessness came to be associated with Sade ... The one thing largely absent... is the novel itself, The 120 Days of Sodom. While the manuscript—the physical book—is discussed at length, Warner, like many of his subjects, seems to not really want to talk about the text itself ... And while the history of the manuscript itself is more than fascinating enough to justify Warner’s book, it may be worth reinvestigating Sade’s own writing, and what value—if any—it has for us these days.
Some readers will regard this as an esoteric exercise, but for bibliophiles, it is a feast and even leaves readers wondering if, as some claim, the manuscript is cursed.
Captivating ... The book’s third strand, an effort to reprise the story of the Marquis de Sade, his life and crimes, is not successful ... Sade’s complex, exciting, and highly documented life is a poor fit with brief journalistic recitals ... Concluding that Sade "may or may not have been a lunatic" is both vague and reductive, failing to come to grips with the abiding power of his writing ... How former insurance broker Gérard Lhéritier purchased and repatriated the lost scroll in 2014... is the story Warner tells with skill, from beginning to end.
Warner tells this history in alternating chapters ... The result is an occasionally confusing chronology that jumps back and forth among the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, but the author provides several valuable maps and a cast of characters at the beginning of the book, which help orient readers. Ultimately, the narrative’s greatest scandal is not the licentious behavior of de Sade... nor the literary stature of his transgressive works but rather the sheer dimension of the investment fraud... in which the scroll played a central role.
