Books like Florville and Courval

Sade’s 18th century grandiloquence is by turns tiring and profound. Unlike the other books of his I have read, this is free of sexual content save a few lecherous characters whose whereabouts are never explicitly detailed like they would be in a novel like “Justine.” Instead, the Marquis de Sade shows his versatility as a writer, this novella reads like a religious parable or a gothic tragedy, furnished with arguably ostentatious prose and passages of meandering philosophy on virtue and piety. Things get going in the final few pages where we get the Marquis de Shyamalan, unbridled by the restraint of subtlety or realism, assailing the reader with a multi-layered twist to die for. And I do mean “to die for” literally. It is a tragedy, after all.