Rating: 
Summary: ...the most sickening work of art of the nineteenth century.
Review: "Alas, the gates of life never swing open except upon death,
never open except upon the palaces and gardens of death. And
the universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable
torture-garden..."
-Torture GardenClara relates descriptions of torture with growing fever to her lover, our narrator, a French bureaucrat, as she takes him on a depraved journey through the most terrible and divine place on earth. The Torture Garden is a beautiful, lush garden in China,
hidden within the walls of a prison (a Bagnio), in which the most
horrible and exquisite punishments are inflicted upon the human body as a work of art. The garden itself it extremely fertile, and thrives from the nourishment that enriches its soil, ?through the excrement of the prisoners, the blood of the tortured', defying the atrocities of it's vile surroundings by producing the most lush, exotic and fragrant flowers in all of China. Clara is a born aristocratic, has all the perversities and bored exterior of a woman of her breeding and era. Unable to obtain sexual pleasure from the usual methods, or perhaps too jaded to try, she is driven to the limits of sensation, seeking and becoming increasingly obsessed with beauty, torture, blood and death. Clara seduces our narrator with promises of the ultimate passion that human's can experience in her search for the ultimate aphrodisiac: beautiful death. "I'll teach you terrible things... divine things. I promise
you'll descend with me to the very depths of the mystery of love... and death!" The Frenchman, a bourgeois and corrupted politician, is captivated by Clara, even though her very nature sickens and repulses him. He finds himself being drawn into her wild web of enchantment and eventually falling prey to her sinful and wicked delusions. "I realized that the very thing that held me to her was the
frightful rottenness of her soul and her crimes of love.
She was a monster, and I loved her for being a monster." The author, Octave Mirbeau, who lived and wrote during the late
nineteenth century, was rebellious and held fast to the doctrines of anarchism which he passionately defended. Throughout his novel, the underlying element is the portrayal of society's hideousness and hypocrisies. His women were powerful creatures, commanding the very forces of life and death itself. It is through the juxtaposition of beauty and horror, that the artful nature of this classic work can be truly realised.
Rating:
Summary: "ART, milady, consists in knowing how to kill...
Review: ...Art, milady, consist in knowing how to kill, according to Rituals of Beauty." so recites an executioner far more disturbing and just as profound as Kafka's self-mutilations 'In The Penal Colony'. Octave Mirbeau's fin-de-siecle brutal fairy-tale is divided down the middle forming a novel hermaphrodite. The first side exploratory of the monstrous exterior life and career of our main character, modelled on Octave Mirbeau himself given the intimate revealings of an anarchists' psyche in considering cultural morals. It produced in me several years ago when I decided against indulging in its perversions a definite revulsion & base attraction; the fault is entirely my own. The book is one where each reader must confront not just realistic characters, but materializations in one's own mind; I am now as a man who has just come full circle in the revolutions of a dark planet consisting of many 'dark nights of the soul' spent in the folds of this amorous creature. Mirbeau charts the progresssion of murder, expounding on topics affecting our contemporary society only more so than his own; foremost is Murder being the primary reason all government exists, as well as calling for their continuation, lest we all openly slaughter one another. Here are discussed serial-killers, televised execution, the hero-illusion suffered by video games & carnival freakshow, the glorification of the ideal soldier in his dutiful murderous abilities, here are the worships of public sports as ritual leftovers from war channelled into arenas built as high & mighty as churches, and the extinction of hunting & the chase & the kill spawning inhuman hunters of human prey...murder as well channelled into celebration & Artistic endeavor, and perhaps most profoundly, murder born from love & reaching its ultimate goal in orgasm with sex itself based on murder's very motions, strivings, the same physiological sensations, often made up of the same harsh words & tone of voice coupled with various levels of pleasure & pain... The other section of this divided self takes one into the interior of the Chinese Garden, where rich black soil profits from the innumerable bodies decomposing in its cellular maw. Taking us on this tour is none other than "Clara", a veritable Salome, the Demonic Woman par excellence; yet at the same time not very different from any other woman who's affected her unsuspecting lovers in ways that left them horrified and in awe of her overwhelming sexual nature, so much a part of her that she bleeds ritually from the wound it has made of her middle. Our main character at first begs her understanding forgiveness of his own dirty conscience & the beastiality he feels has made a veritable demon of himself; unsuspecting of her nature until it is she who takes him to her favorite place in the world: the torture garden. Here are encountered sub-limits of barbarous erotica, blooming hothouse flowers that are but sexual organs more refined & pronounced than the appendages of humankind. Our green-eyed red-haired Clara does unthought of wonders with the pollens & poisons of these, the rarest flowers collected from all over the world and tended to with exacting delicacy by traditional Chinese gardeners trained in the fine Arts of Torture & horticulture, now extinct except for this one last garden preserved within the quadrilateral confines of perhaps the largest prison in the world, where upon entering it's as if a whole new self-sifficient sky & atmosphere is found here, heightening one's senses to the pitch of delirium, the reader's as well. It is a place of sublime brutality, where sex & death are mingled to an unprecedented degree unimagined by the world's most glorious murderers and sexual deviants. The story will not be given away by a low aspirant who can only give praises unto such magickal works as encountered there. He promises though only the highest quality of tortures, none of that cheap pulpous stuff found in cheap bestselling fiction, this tale is not made up of fruitless & pointless indulgences in the wasted efforts of the truly useless Arts of "entertainment-only"! Only the most exquisite depths of debauch and the highest grandiose summits are scaled, in a highly refined manner than took centuries to develop. Be assured, if you must, such is a cleansing purification rite upon the organs & instruments of eternal human suffering, so valiently though vainly attempted in the depiction of Chrixt nailed and hung upon his crucifix. Disturbing?-yes, to those who would feign innocence & turn red when caught, possessed of unspeakable thoughts, in the all-seeing eyes of a great work of Literature; even if just fixed for a moment by the eyes of a knowing character in a book that casts no eternal damnation? "It is, of course, an indecent novel, because it assults the very notion of "decency" as a hollow sham!"
Rating: 
Summary: Whoa...........
Review: Earlier, I said somewhere about some book that reading it was like getting a hefty punch in the face. I was wrong. Now THIS book feels that way. Compared to it, all your "shocking" novels fade. In fact, it seems almost as if the likes of Ballard, Palahniuk, and similar hacks were all aping this book when they were writing their "nihilistic novels." 102 years after it was written, it's still unreservedly terrifying - I can only imagine the utter frenzy it must have caused upon its release! Anyways, this is the story of a young Frenchman who engages in shady political intrigue, capping off each day with some booze and whores. Your typical debaucher, in short. Then, circumstances require him to go abroad, and he meets Clara, a beautiful-on-the-outside, hideous-on-the-inside young lady who invites him to China. He takes her up, and finds out that his debauches and misdeeds were small fry compared to the utter horrors he sees there. The sexual deviancy is just the beginning - an average day leads him to follow Clara into The Torture Garden, a place that combines beauty and death, growing all sorts of exotic, lovely flowers in the soil that's nourished with the broken bodies of the executed. Of course, the descriptions of the tortures themselves are ghastly enough, but the casual attitude that Clara takes towards death and torture is the true horror here - she admires it, she finds it beautiful, she equates it to love and passion, she actually finds sexual pleasure in it (the book's end has her in the throes of an immense orgasm). But the book is not just another piece of deliberately shocking trash, as the "works" of the aforementioned imitators tend to be. It is redeemed by the fact that, ghastly as Mirbeau's observations are, any sane reader will be forced to admit their truth. This starts in the prologue, where a lively discussion about the role of murder in society takes place - the reader knows that murder is horrible, as do the people discussing it, but many of their observations will ring painfully true. The book frequently forces the reader to confront himself in this way. Again, I can only imagine the reception this book had in 1899. First, Mirbeau was an atheist; second, an anarchist; third, Clara is bisexual; fourth, she has hideous fetishes; fifth, sixth, etc. Nigh every page is festering with corruption and decadence - the protagonist's, and the book's, redeeming quality is that this corruption is recognized as such. The protagonist yearns to get out of the hell-hole he's in, but he is too weak; he loves Clara's beauty, but hates the abominable sore of her soul. He hates the torture and the false beauty and the executioner who takes such pride in his awful work, but he recognizes that Europe is simply a more veiled, more "civilized" version of the same - thus China and the garden function as allegories, and the book gains a new meaning as a denunciation of all the unthinkable human brutality of modern civilization. "In this intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers." It's hard to say whether I recommend this book or not. It's quite the page-turner, certainly, but it takes rather strong nerves to finish (and then it's unlikely you'll ever re-read it). You'll have to decide for yourself. But I WOULD recommend it over the likes of Crash/Fight Club/etc. - as long as you're aiming to read a book that's violently distasteful, at least read the one that possesses some artistic merit.
Rating:
Summary: Whoa...........
Review: Earlier, I said somewhere about some book that reading it was like getting a hefty punch in the face. I was wrong. Now THIS book feels that way. Compared to it, all your "shocking" novels fade. In fact, it seems almost as if the likes of Ballard, Palahniuk, and similar hacks were all aping this book when they were writing their "nihilistic novels." 102 years after it was written, it's still unreservedly terrifying - I can only imagine the utter frenzy it must have caused upon its release! Anyways, this is the story of a young Frenchman who engages in shady political intrigue, capping off each day with some booze and whores. Your typical debaucher, in short. Then, circumstances require him to go abroad, and he meets Clara, a beautiful-on-the-outside, hideous-on-the-inside young lady who invites him to China. He takes her up, and finds out that his debauches and misdeeds were small fry compared to the utter horrors he sees there. The sexual deviancy is just the beginning - an average day leads him to follow Clara into The Torture Garden, a place that combines beauty and death, growing all sorts of exotic, lovely flowers in the soil that's nourished with the broken bodies of the executed. Of course, the descriptions of the tortures themselves are ghastly enough, but the casual attitude that Clara takes towards death and torture is the true horror here - she admires it, she finds it beautiful, she equates it to love and passion, she actually finds sexual pleasure in it (the book's end has her in the throes of an immense orgasm). But the book is not just another piece of deliberately shocking trash, as the "works" of the aforementioned imitators tend to be. It is redeemed by the fact that, ghastly as Mirbeau's observations are, any sane reader will be forced to admit their truth. This starts in the prologue, where a lively discussion about the role of murder in society takes place - the reader knows that murder is horrible, as do the people discussing it, but many of their observations will ring painfully true. The book frequently forces the reader to confront himself in this way. Again, I can only imagine the reception this book had in 1899. First, Mirbeau was an atheist; second, an anarchist; third, Clara is bisexual; fourth, she has hideous fetishes; fifth, sixth, etc. Nigh every page is festering with corruption and decadence - the protagonist's, and the book's, redeeming quality is that this corruption is recognized as such. The protagonist yearns to get out of the hell-hole he's in, but he is too weak; he loves Clara's beauty, but hates the abominable sore of her soul. He hates the torture and the false beauty and the executioner who takes such pride in his awful work, but he recognizes that Europe is simply a more veiled, more "civilized" version of the same - thus China and the garden function as allegories, and the book gains a new meaning as a denunciation of all the unthinkable human brutality of modern civilization. "In this intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers." It's hard to say whether I recommend this book or not. It's quite the page-turner, certainly, but it takes rather strong nerves to finish (and then it's unlikely you'll ever re-read it). You'll have to decide for yourself. But I WOULD recommend it over the likes of Crash/Fight Club/etc. - as long as you're aiming to read a book that's violently distasteful, at least read the one that possesses some artistic merit.
Rating: 
Summary: Where is the depravity?
Review: I purchased this book expecting the level of depravity or baseness found in classic works such as "Maldoror" but I was sorely disappointed by "The Torture Garden." I can't fault the author for his style and eloquence as both are laudable (this is the only reason I gave the book three stars) in my opinion. However, I found the story lacking in overall substance and especially in moral baseness. The story was everything but engaging and though I enjoyed the author's style of writing I would have appreciated a story that really pulled me in. I found no satisfaction when I finished the book and it was really a struggle for me to complete despite its length. Once again this goes back to the overall lack of shocking depravity and a page turning story.
Rating:
Summary: The Garden is Always Greener...
Review: I purchased this book not knowing what to expect, and read it cover to cover still not quite sure what I had purchased. True, the writing is nothing less than spectacular. And if you were living in France in 1899, you would no doubt find the symbolism and commentary provocative to the point of being scandalous, perhaps even seditious. But we are not living in France, and it's not 1899 (though I sometimes wish it were). Guess all I can offer as an opinion is that the book is interesting as an anachronistic and, again, beautifully written, "love story" cum political tract, but I think it will leave most modern readers more bemused than gratified.
Rating: 
Summary: The Garden is Always Greener...
Review: I purchased this book not knowing what to expect, and read it cover to cover still not quite sure what I had purchased. True, the writing is nothing less than spectacular. And if you were living in France in 1899, you would no doubt find the symbolism and commentary provocative to the point of being scandalous, perhaps even seditious. But we are not living in France, and it's not 1899 (though I sometimes wish it were). Guess all I can offer as an opinion is that the book is interesting as an anachronistic and, again, beautifully written, "love story" cum political tract, but I think it will leave most modern readers more bemused than gratified.
Rating: 
Summary: This book was poor
Review: This book was poor. i found it to be lacking in debauchery, it's writing puerile in form and content, and it's dialogue/grammer obnoxious. from the reviews, i assumed that reading this book was going to be an act of social heresy. i did not even find it to be profoundly nihilistic or anarchistic, at least not on the the scale of bret easton ellis and other contemporaries. i found mirbeau's philosophy to be very adolescent, on par with some of the greats of high school writing contests. in the torture garden i was looking for moral objection from myself and instead i found a very silly book. clara was the single most annoying character in any book since dean moriarty. the whole time i was thiniking, please kill her. shut her up. she sounded like some kind of attention craving goth teenager, every sentence a clone in structure: blah, blah, blah... and death! she turned what could have been a somewhat serious, if not poorly structured, meditation on death and turned it into a farce. i was howling toward the end of the book because this woman was so ridiculous. also, there seemed to be a disturbing abundance of exclamation points. i kept thinking to myself, "why are these people shouting all the time?" it was like that episode of seinfeld where elaine gets angry about her writer boyfriend's lack of punctuation so she edits his book with all sorts of unnecessary exclamation marks. it was almost as though mr. mirbeau was too lazy to properly develop his characters so he had them scream all the time to give the impression of conflict and depth. you can scream all you want mr. mirbeau but your book still stinks.
Rating:
Summary: This book was poor
Review: This book was poor. i found it to be lacking in debauchery, it's writing puerile in form and content, and it's dialogue/grammer obnoxious. from the reviews, i assumed that reading this book was going to be an act of social heresy. i did not even find it to be profoundly nihilistic or anarchistic, at least not on the the scale of bret easton ellis and other contemporaries. i found mirbeau's philosophy to be very adolescent, on par with some of the greats of high school writing contests. in the torture garden i was looking for moral objection from myself and instead i found a very silly book. clara was the single most annoying character in any book since dean moriarty. the whole time i was thiniking, please kill her. shut her up. she sounded like some kind of attention craving goth teenager, every sentence a clone in structure: blah, blah, blah... and death! she turned what could have been a somewhat serious, if not poorly structured, meditation on death and turned it into a farce. i was howling toward the end of the book because this woman was so ridiculous. also, there seemed to be a disturbing abundance of exclamation points. i kept thinking to myself, "why are these people shouting all the time?" it was like that episode of seinfeld where elaine gets angry about her writer boyfriend's lack of punctuation so she edits his book with all sorts of unnecessary exclamation marks. it was almost as though mr. mirbeau was too lazy to properly develop his characters so he had them scream all the time to give the impression of conflict and depth. you can scream all you want mr. mirbeau but your book still stinks.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful, sometimes horrific but fascinating book....
Review: Torture garden has been compared to the Marquis de Sade. It begins quite normal, a drawing room discussion, the subject however is murderers and their role in society. After this it develops into the most cruel book i've ever read, a decadent story that ends in the Torture Garden, a chinese garden with the most horrific tortures imaginable. Distorted views on beauty, mixed with blood and flowers. Life is as important as death. "Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love glory, heroism, and religion: these are it's monstrous flowers and it's hideous instruments of eternal human suffering" Octave Mirbeau is an original and powerful writer. Underneath the surface of this book lies his motive, to expose the hypocrisies of society; to shock the reader into a realisation that much of what he takes for granted is cruel and ugly. Like Sade, Mirbeau was an atheist, and at that time that was something outrageous. he knew what good and evil was, but what bothered him was that in the so called civilised society, so much evil was portrayed as good, and most people didn't notice or care. In torture garden he set out to show people what their world, behind it's hypocrisies, was really like.
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