Customer Reviews

The Torture Garden (The New Traveller's Companion Series)

5 star:		(6)
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3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

"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 Garden

Clara 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.

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.

...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!"

**** THE FOLLOWING REVIEW PERTAINS ONLY TO THIS "NEW TRAVELLER'S COMPANION" EDITION OF THE TORTURE GARDEN ****

Other reviewers here have eloquently discussed the merits of Mirbeau's The Torture Garden, and I have nothing to add about the book itself. This edition, however, is cheap and horrifically edited (the horror having nothing to do with the subject matter). It reads as if someone brewed a couple pots of coffee, opened up the word processing program on his/her computer, typed the novel out as quickly as possible, and then sent it straight to a publisher without making any corrections. The number of typos is unacceptable for a high school typing class, let alone a republication of an underground classic.

Whatever the merits of this novel, DO NOT BUY THIS EDITION.

Aside from the topic of the book, this particular edition ('The New Traveller's Companion,' violent green cover), was riddled with grammatical errors, typographical errors. Don't buy this one, find another version.

As for the book, I was rivetted! But I like intense literature. I suppose this book is the most alarming thing I've read, but it contains insight into human existence, misanthropic and aesthetic. If you can face work like Lautreamont, Bataille, Ryu Murakami, or even films like Salo, it's for you. I would not recommend it to many people, though, particularly because its effectiveness is deeply conceptual. It uses various metaphors to equate typical opposites, love and death, good and evil, man and woman, into the same decadent event of life.

The story opens with a select group of elitist swine sitting down to a fancy supper. Many banal topics of conversation are broached with levity and mocking sarcasm, until the topic of murder comes up. Specifically, murder as an innate biological human need, much like procreation. I liked where this book was heading...

Our protagonist fancies himself a most vile and debauched jack-of-all-trades; actually, he is more of an impostor of all trades, and liar extraordinaire. However, while on a steam ship, en route to his next great scheme, he meets his match in Clara. A deep love blossoms between them, and our protagonist's heart, weakened by her purity and chastity, falls prey to her charms. But Clara is not as she appears, the chaste little cherry blossom, no, no, Clara can be likened to a great degree to Venus, in Masoch's Venus in Furs. So, mad, stricken with love, our protagonist confesses the sins of his life to Clara, and she comforts him, assuring him that his confession has not diminished her love for him. Subsequently, she, with the skill of a serpent, leads him astray into her world, a world where he will not only question the depth and breadth of his own depravity but his sanity as well. For Clara's soul is as black and consuming as a tar pit.

Political intrigue and hypocrisy abound, not to mention the ever-prevalent scathing view of humanity and its coarse, ignorant brutality, motivated by dogma and prejudice. And then there is the Garden...inspired by the ethereal beauty, our protagonist at this point in the story becomes quite poetic. The words are rich and romantic, and they mirror the duality of the story - the duality of mankind - the heavenly garden juxtaposed against an artistic milieu of horrific torture. Why is it that we cannot see the beauty of the world until we are stripped naked, face down at the bottom of the abyss with our heads shoved in our own bile? Maybe this story will shed some light.

As I mentioned, this is not the best presentation of the work, but, if you can get past the frustration of formatting issues and endless typos and grammatical errors, this is a story not to be missed, simply for its profound view on the brutal nature of humanity. Warning - the torture depicted in this book is quite gruesome, by 1899 standards anyway. Today's Saw and Hostel hack-and-slash movie generation will more than likely find it rather mild.

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.

Reviewing this book is a mixed thing: On one hand, we have Mirbeau's evocative classic, which describes a journey into the heart of exotic decadence - torture, in particular, as well as the erotic enjoyment of it. It is essentially a tale of two lovers, a weak, insecure man and a deranged, sadistic lady, set in China. And in addition to the shock value and morbid titilation, Mirbeau has managed to infect his prose with a lot of subtle cultural critique, on both Europeans and the Chinese. This is a deliciously horrific book.

On the other hand, this particular English edition does not at all do the original full justice. Much of the strength of Mirbeau's stilistic changes have been lost in the sloppy translation, and the text is rife with irritating typos. Furthermore, the overall impression given by the cheap look and production quality is that of either a trashy second-rate pornographic thriller or a dry text-book, not one of the classics of decadent literature. This is not the edition to purchase. Luckily enough, several better versions also exist.

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.