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Torture Garden (Decadence from Dedalus) Paperback – May 9, 2010

by Octave Mirbeau (Author), Brian Stableford (Editor), Michael Richardson (Translator)

25 customer reviews

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"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 Times

Torture Garden (Decadence from Dedalus)

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Product Details

Series: Decadence from Dedalus
Paperback: 206 pages
Publisher: Dedalus Limited; Fourth edition (May 9, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1903517877
ISBN-13: 978-1903517871
Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 7.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,225,976 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #24386 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics
- #58931 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary
- #69077 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Erotica

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Customer Reviews

3.6 out of 5 stars

5 star		36%
4 star		20%
3 star		24%
2 star		8%
1 star		12%

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Top Customer Reviews

Whoa...........

By Angry Mofo on November 6, 2001

Format: Paperback

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.Read more ›

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

By A Customer on October 12, 2002

Format: Paperback

"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.Read more ›

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A wonderful, sometimes horrific but fascinating book....

By black_flower_@hotmail.com on July 6, 1998

Format: Paperback

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

By Anita Fix on July 25, 2001

Format: Paperback

...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...Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

the main character is whiny and sometimes really annoying. Worth...

The beginning is a bit dry and slow. Really the payoff is the end of the book: slick language and polished emotional edge. Read more

Published 1 month ago by mario rivas

What u have here... is a waterd ...

What u have here... is a waterd down version... of my public wish list... if you were there... you know what I mean... Clara! Read more

Published 12 months ago by David Jones

Purchase another edition

DO NOT BUY THIS EDITION unless you can read Egyptian Hieroglyphs!!! This edition is a printing disaster loaded with broken letters that make it impossible to read. Read more

Published 22 months ago by Juan Malo

Some Philosophical Aspects of Torture Garden

Octave Mirbeau was a popular writer of his day, with a wide ranging scope of interest. He wrote in many literary genres, sometimes, as in the case of this book, combining the real... Read more

Published on April 1, 2014 by Paul Dolinsky

Perfect Condition

Book came as stated. It looked as if it had never been open, or better yet as if no one has read it. That is how I like it. Thank you.

Published on February 15, 2014 by J.A. Torres

JennifersLookingGlass.tumblr.com

Please note that I read the Kindle version illustrated by Jeanette Seelhoff and translated by Alvah C. Bessie. Read more

Published on September 30, 2013 by J

Probably not for the average reader

While the descriptions of vegetation and flowers especially are the most amazing I've ever read, the story itself is more than a bit bizarre. Read more

Published on November 1, 2012 by Lance Ludlow

sick but brilliant

I became curious about this book after reading a quote from it on the album cover of a Manic Street Preachers album, the quote rang true to me and i wanted to find out more about... Read more

Published on May 25, 2012 by Lewis Woolston

A mangled edition of a classic

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... Read more

Published on July 27, 2009 by Harviainen Jussi T

Shocking and editing for dummies

Apart from the text in in its strict meaning (which maybe was shocking a century ago, but that even a century ago was repetitive and annoying - and i'm not only talking about to... Read more

Published on February 9, 2009 by Nicola Binewski

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