Deleuze's book is, at least for no other reason, a worthwhile read for its sheer imagination. Secondly, it is worth reading as it shows just what is so wonderfully interesting about Leibniz. If you know Leibniz, read this book, even just a single section, and then you will understand why there do exist, in small obscure places, Leibnitians. If you are looking for a splendidly imaginative perspective, read up.

A must read!

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This is, indeed a very good book, but you need to have some background in philosophy and mathematics to get the full of it.

Merely a passable English translation of Le Pli, a late masterpiece by the sublime Gilles Deleuze, would merit five stars on the amazon.com scale, but alas...!
The explanation of how such a travesty can be perpetrated must involve both the necessity of publishing that presses upon young academics - if you can believe it, this Tom Conley is a professor of French! - and the frenetic pace of production that afflicts the publishing industry as any other under the reign of capitalism. (That's some excuse!)
"Comment aurait-il une volonté libre, celui dont `la notion individuelle renferme une fois pour toutes ce qui lui arrivera jamais'?" When I came to this on page 94 of the French edition, it translated itself automatically, unproblematically, as: "How could he have a free will, he of whom `the individual notion encloses once and for all what will ever happen to him'?" But here's Conley [pg.69]: "How could there be free will, a will whose `individual notion encloses once and for all those who will never come to it'?" Now this is an interpretation that would have occurred to no one without Professor Conley's help. (Thanks a lot!) Besides the question of what Conley's sentence could possibly mean in the context of Deleuze's thought in this passage, the "individual notion" is indisputably not that of "free will" because "volonté" is feminine and the pronoun "celui" is masculine! The most amazing thing about Conley's performance is that most of this sentence is not even new Deleuzian prose, expressing a novel late-twentieth-century idea, but a direct quote of Leibniz, referring to a well-known aspect of his system: The "individual notion" of each monad includes everything that will ever happen to that monad and is thus seemingly - that is the question! - an obstacle to the monad's possession of free will. (In the back of his book, Conley lists the editions of Leibniz that Deleuze himself would have consulted and informs us that he has relied upon previous English translations, where available. Elsewhere he has "directly translated Deleuze's quotations or translations of material taken from those texts...")
Where does Conley's "those" come from? - the fantasmal subjects he has performing the hallucinated action of "never coming to" the will whose individual notion nevertheless encloses them once and for all (huh?!?). There is no plural pronoun in Deleuze/Leibniz's sentence, but Conley finds one by disassembling the idiom "une fois pour toutes" ("once and for all," "definitively"). Likewise, he interprets "arrivera" literally, "will come to," rather than idiomatically, and accurately, as "will happen." (I have detected a tendency toward overliteralness in another Conley effort, where he seems to show off his awareness of what the actual French "really" says. In this case, however, he has totally missed the primary meaning!)
When Conley writes the exact opposite of the French edition, one may suspect that a compositor has dropped a negative. But too often the confusion is clearly Conley's own - for example, when Deleuze [pg. 61] says "prime numbers are primitive/original because..." and proceeds with their definition, Conley [pg. 45] says "the first numbers ["one, two, three..."?] are primary..." Whatever that would mean.
And then there are matters of taste. Where Deleuze describes a state of indecision and the contemplation of his options of spending the evening at a nightclub or staying in and working [pg. 95], Conley changes Deleuze's "le bruit des pages" to "the hum of the word processor" [pg. 70]. Anyone who's ever seen (or read about) Deleuze's fingernails would be unable to picture him typing. Why did Conley decide that Deleuze's phrase needed updating? The philosopher's longhand seems symbolic of the time he took to formulate his thought and the infinite care he took in transmitting the thought of others.
This translation is still better than nothing for someone interested in Deleuze and unable to read him in French. But since the real shame is that, with this on the market, no one is likely to undertake another English translation anytime soon, it is to be hoped that Tom Conley will seek to correct some of the flaws of his effort.

I find Deleuze's earlier books on figures from the history of philosophy (Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Hume) far more interesting and coherent than his collaborations with Guattari. However, this book finds itself in the middle of these two tendencies: no, it's Deleuze on his own, he's writing about a major (but overlooked)philosopher in a manner that can only be deemed: schizophrenic. And since Leibniz's philosophy is schizo at times, the pairing is near perfect (the best of all possible worlds).
The opening image of the Baroque is a bit vague, but then again, Deleuze has always been short on precise connections and plentiful on creative and unorthodox imageries. Some sections are plain impossible to decipher. The are best imagined than really thought-through. For example, how is Deleuze using Leibniz's calculus? I'm still lost. I'll probably never understand. But somehow, I think that he may be right about this--whatever he may be suggesting in evoking the calculus. The book is also full of other interesting and elusive scientific theories in the realm of physics, mathematics, and set-theory. (I don't know much about any of these subjects and so I shall remain silent on these matters.)
Unlike the earlier writings on the history of philosophy where Deleuze remained faithful in his readings, "The Fold" is definitely a performance of Deleuze-Leibniz--more Deleuze than Leibniz but Leibniz as, shall we say, a creative inspiration? In this sense, "The Fold" is closer to Deleuze's book on Foucault in that he creates a new philosopher: a cyborg, built out of love, remembrance, and a goal towards the future.
But then again, does Deleuze top Leibniz in outrageousness? Who was more out-there? Somehow, I think that Leibniz was a bit more out there...

While my French is not good enough to judge others, I find it very easy to believe that this translation is not good. I found this book the most difficult of Deleuze's works, and I think the translator did not understand his task. To recover I needed to undertake a rereading of Leibniz so I could see through the English text before me and re-establish the original terms and questions.
Still, if you do not read French well, this very important book should not escape you even in this edition. Leibniz was a giant at the watershed between faith and science who was able to span this divide and think with complexity and innovation about the soul and mathematics. Since then, few can handle either vocabulary with such perspective, and almost none, save Deleuze, have tried to understand the demands of both.
If one does not, as almost all do, take for granted the givens of the centered subject and the rational world, their mutual differences demand a theory as powerful as the complexities they evoke. This book attempts to place that theory in play again with vigor.