Book Review of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos DeLaclos
Name of Book: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) Author: Choderlos DeLaclos ISBN: 0-14-044116-6 Publisher: Penguin Classics Type of book: Epistolary novel, 1700s, aristocrats, ancien regime, darkness, France, pick up artists, naivety Year it was published: 1782 (version I have 1988) Summary: 'If this book burns' proclaimed Baudelaire, 'it burns as only ice can burn.' Marie-Antoinette kept a bound copy of this notorious study of sexual intrigue in her private library; and it was condemned by a criminal court forty years after its publication in 1782 and publicly incinerated. The satanic hero and heroine of this greatest of eighteenth-century novels- a pair of depraved aristocrats- plot and achieve the seduction of a young convent girl with the calm detachment of mathematicians solving an algebraic formula. Honest to the point of cynicism, this is a fascinating exposure of an aristocracy shortly to perish in the French Revolution. Chara...