Torture Garden

by Octave Mirbeau

Book Overview

"A century after its first publication, this book is still capable of shocking. The opening satire is probably meaningful only to scholars of French political history, but the subsequent journey into the Far East accentuates connections between love and death, sex and depravity, fastidiousness and pleasure. And the petty, parochial corruptions of the narrator are put into context by the immersion into the Sadeian world of the Torture Garden."
The...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1912868059
• ISBN13: 9781912868056
• Release Date: July 2019
• Publisher: Dedalus
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

duality

This is one of the few books I've read which continually resurface in my consciousness. To say that this is a book of depravity, lust, and horror is to miss the point. It is such a book, but it is also a commentary on the natural evolution of social order and the dualistic nature of society. The central theme? Life arises from death, beauty from decay, civil society from brutality. Yes this notion is cliche' but Mirbeau's portrait of it is nothing but masterful. Of all the works of this genre I've read, nothing comes close to this work. I can not recommend it enough.

A Masterpiece of Black Humor and Philosophy

In little more than a century since its initial publication, this book has become even more horrifically relevent and pointed. Mirbeau's juxtapositions of beauty and horror keep the reader unsettled, but also support a philosophical rumination on the industrialization of warfare and violence, contrasted against the exquisite artistry of torture practiced in the lush, gorgeous garden of a Chinese bagnio. The casually inflicted horrors of modern warfare (which have increased a thousandfold since this work was penned) may very well be, as the author seems to assert, much more barbaric than the intimate agonies of torture practiced as an art. Those seeking pornographic diversion and other casual readers will be disappointed by the depth of this work and the ghastliness of its transgressions. With tortuous skill, Mirbeau peels back layers of subject matter to expose hypocrisy that is even greater today. As a work of black humor, The Torture Garden served as a supreme inspiration to the late Michael O'Donoghue, whose gallows wit delighted readers of National Lampoon Magazine and viewers of old school Saturday Night Live. I have never read another novel remotely like this and can't recommend it highly enough to connoisseurs of subversive, visionary literature. This is not a book for the squeamish or those whose attention span has been crippled by mass media. This is a profound meditation on the nature of violence and beauty, as well as a castigation of the casual, disconnected mass-murder that has come to typify modern warfare. I would recommend the RE:search Press edition of this work for its careful editing and thoughtful illustrations.

Beautifully written

While many of these reviews dwell on the subject matter of this wonderful book, none seem to address the purity of the writing itself; this is a gorgeously written novel which more than stands up to multiple re-readings. The sheer loveliness of the prose taken in contrast to the many scenes of horror described form a delightful contrast. The pictures in this edition add to the experience.

...the most sickening work of art of the nineteenth century.

"Alas, the gates of life never swing open except upon death,never open except upon the palaces and gardens of death. Andthe universe appears to me like an immense, inexorabletorture-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 mosthorrible 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 promiseyou'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 thefrightful 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 latenineteenth 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.

"ART, milady, consists in knowing how to kill...

...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 & prono