Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Amsterdam : Arbeiderspers; 219 p, 20 cm; http://opc4.kb.nl/DB=1/PPN?PPN=801859867
User reviews
LibraryThing member Randy_Hierodule
In this review I mainly want to recommend Michael Richardson's translation over Alvah Bessie's. Bessie's (the translation used in the Re-Search and the Citadel editions) is not only dated, but scoured.
Torture Garden is an ornately arranged collection of horrors. It is a satire - a Mundane Comedy
Mirbeau has never been very popular. He doesn't have very nice things to say. Nice people, just societies, serve a higher purpose. They do not exist simply to mate and die. Nor do they torture - much less make an art of it (no, they have "theme parks" instead). Maiming and killing are unlawful, strictly apportioned to the office of the state - and then applied only as an exigency of official business or, rather, of national security.
In brief, all good and gentle people have arrived at smug enlightenment on a trail of corpses, and that enlightenment itself has its occult roots in crime. More than this, in a world where the interests of corporations and governments are basically one and the same, and entertainment is a multibillion dollar industry, Mirbeau still has something useful and nasty to tell us.
Torture Garden is an ornately arranged collection of horrors. It is a satire - a Mundane Comedy
Show More
(a black one, that begins and ends in Purgatory.) - cruel and beautiful as a flower, to paraphrase the garden's poet-torturer. Mirbeau seems to sneer at his reader, presumably the over-cultivated, over-sated, over-educated flower of modern society: True decadence, real perversity, culminates in you, dear readers - the produce of a civilized society, which is essentially a criminal and contrived garden of forms (religion, art, law, philosophy, etc.), seeded and nourished in a bed of rapine and slaughter, where attar is a distillate of gore. The history, character, and late-blooming fine feelings of the narrator, incidentally, are very much to the point.Mirbeau has never been very popular. He doesn't have very nice things to say. Nice people, just societies, serve a higher purpose. They do not exist simply to mate and die. Nor do they torture - much less make an art of it (no, they have "theme parks" instead). Maiming and killing are unlawful, strictly apportioned to the office of the state - and then applied only as an exigency of official business or, rather, of national security.
In brief, all good and gentle people have arrived at smug enlightenment on a trail of corpses, and that enlightenment itself has its occult roots in crime. More than this, in a world where the interests of corporations and governments are basically one and the same, and entertainment is a multibillion dollar industry, Mirbeau still has something useful and nasty to tell us.
Show Less
LibraryThing member veilofisis
‘Here and there in the indentations of the palisade, appearing like halls of verdure and flower-beds, were wooden benches equipped with chains and bronze necklaces, iron tables shaped like crosses, blocks and racks, gibbets, automatic quartering machines, beds laden with cutting blades, bristling
Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden is the most hideously brutal, debauched, splenetic, and disturbing piece of fiction I have ever encountered. It reads, on one level, as a catalog of the most odious, shamelessly rococo sadism known to imagination; but, on a second level—and this its more intended level—it is an allegory of political and moral corruption: a seething and merciless satire of the hypocrisies that blight the human race from beneath the sheep’s-clothing called ‘civilization.’ Wilde described it as ‘revolting’ and as ‘a sort of grey adder;’ his assessment is fitting: Torture Garden is an appallingly perverse, venomous, and decimating novel.
Written at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, Mirbeau’s scathing attack on the sanctimonious sophism of the governing elite is, at times, overpoweringly mephitic: it smells of pus and rotten meat and old urine; it tastes of bile and gall and shit. But intermingled with this miasma of death and miserable suffering, there is the insistent perfume of the countless flowers that Mirbeau has painted in luxuriant, almost indulgent, detail: and this is no paradox: because amid the corruption of life, amid the charnel-house and the devouring flies, there is a kind of haunted beauty that is fertilized by this horror and this filth: the blossoms of the Torture Garden are fed by the same flesh and blood that is flayed, molested, and slaughtered within it; the inescapable fact is that this beauty could not thrive without the repugnance that both envelops and is enveloped by it.
The plot details the exploits of a French debauchee who, after meandering through the vapid hypocrisies of political life in fin de siècle Paris, chances to meet a beautiful, recondite Englishwoman, Clara, at sea; deeply attracted to the veil of innocence that cloaks what he perceives to be a curiously ‘well-educated’ immorality, our narrator sets up house with her in her adopted homeland of China. It is only upon their visit to the Torture Garden, however, that our narrator comes to comprehend the sheer depths of Clara’s iniquity: of her lust, filth, and ultimate evil.
This is an incredibly challenging book; and while it has become a near-cliché to caution ‘the faint of heart,’ it is important to warn prospective readers of Torture Garden that, while nearly one-hundred-and-fifteen-years-old, Mirbeau’s masterpiece remains one of the more luridly depraved novels ever published. I’ve read Sade, Mandiargues, and others of their proclivity: Torture Garden, much more than rakish pornography, reduces their prurient fantasies to exactly that: fantasies. But in Torture Garden we glimpse the malice that flickers within the heart of real evil: within these pages, Mirbeau prophesies the horrors of genocide, social imperialism, and violence-for-violence's-sake. Some of the more disturbing episodes in the novel do not play out in the Torture Garden at all: the conversation between a British officer and a French explorer about the disposability of human beings—of Dum-Dum bullets and ‘civilized’ cannibalism, of the imminent goal of entirely eliminating both the physical and intangible existence of the ‘enemy’—remain as strikingly and singularly appalling as any gruesomely reprobate episode detailed from within the Torture Garden itself: and this despite the obvious satire (or perhaps even because of it) with which the scene is suffused. These pages drip with blood, yes—but also with cyanide.
I have discovered that Torture Garden’s ability to shock, stupefy, and disgust loses nothing upon rereading—if anything, this endless index of baroque debauchery and pornographic cruelty waxes ever-more loathsome, like a bit of maggot-eaten carrion whose sight, while nauseating, can never repulse as strongly as the noxious horror of its smell. But, for all this, it remains an unavoidably relevant novel—one we must read and reread, regardless of how it turns our stomachs and wounds our hearts. This is Torture Garden’s purpose: to awaken us to the tangible horror of existence, to the lies that pass as ‘truths’ and to the murders that pass as ‘inevitabilities,’ lest we should forget or—far worse—choose to ignore them. It is not with mere irony that Mirbeau prefaced his novel thusly: ‘To the priests, the soldiers, the judges: to those people who educate, instruct and govern men: I dedicate these pages of Murder and Blood.’
With its airy exoticism and heartless cruelty, its juxtaposition of indescribably violent torture and indescribably beautiful flowers, its excoriating anger and its electrifying sensuality, Torture Garden is not merely a classic of the Decadence, but a classic of the human soul. These grotesque and poisonous pages have etched themselves, for both better and worse, indelibly upon my brain: and for the bravest of readers, they will open onto vistas of incomparable truth: for beyond the Torture Garden lies a beauty that cannot be grasped without first glimpsing the barbarity with which it is inextricably bound.
Show More
with steel points, fixed chokers, props and wheels, boilers and basins above extinguished hearth, all the implements of sacrifice and torture covered in blood—in some places dried and darkish, in others sticky and red. Puddles of blood filled the hollows in the ground and long tears of congealed blood hung from the dismantled mechanisms. Around these machines the ground had absorbed the blood. But blood still stained the whiteness of the jasmines and flecked the coral-pink of the honeysuckles and the mauve of the passion flowers. And small fragments of human flesh, caught by whips and leather lashes, had flown here and there on to the tops of petals and leaves. Noticing that I was feeling faint and that I flinched at these puddles whose stain had enlarged and reached the middle of the avenue, Clara, in a gentle voice, encouraged me: “That’s nothing yet, darling… Let’s go on!”’Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden is the most hideously brutal, debauched, splenetic, and disturbing piece of fiction I have ever encountered. It reads, on one level, as a catalog of the most odious, shamelessly rococo sadism known to imagination; but, on a second level—and this its more intended level—it is an allegory of political and moral corruption: a seething and merciless satire of the hypocrisies that blight the human race from beneath the sheep’s-clothing called ‘civilization.’ Wilde described it as ‘revolting’ and as ‘a sort of grey adder;’ his assessment is fitting: Torture Garden is an appallingly perverse, venomous, and decimating novel.
Written at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, Mirbeau’s scathing attack on the sanctimonious sophism of the governing elite is, at times, overpoweringly mephitic: it smells of pus and rotten meat and old urine; it tastes of bile and gall and shit. But intermingled with this miasma of death and miserable suffering, there is the insistent perfume of the countless flowers that Mirbeau has painted in luxuriant, almost indulgent, detail: and this is no paradox: because amid the corruption of life, amid the charnel-house and the devouring flies, there is a kind of haunted beauty that is fertilized by this horror and this filth: the blossoms of the Torture Garden are fed by the same flesh and blood that is flayed, molested, and slaughtered within it; the inescapable fact is that this beauty could not thrive without the repugnance that both envelops and is enveloped by it.
The plot details the exploits of a French debauchee who, after meandering through the vapid hypocrisies of political life in fin de siècle Paris, chances to meet a beautiful, recondite Englishwoman, Clara, at sea; deeply attracted to the veil of innocence that cloaks what he perceives to be a curiously ‘well-educated’ immorality, our narrator sets up house with her in her adopted homeland of China. It is only upon their visit to the Torture Garden, however, that our narrator comes to comprehend the sheer depths of Clara’s iniquity: of her lust, filth, and ultimate evil.
This is an incredibly challenging book; and while it has become a near-cliché to caution ‘the faint of heart,’ it is important to warn prospective readers of Torture Garden that, while nearly one-hundred-and-fifteen-years-old, Mirbeau’s masterpiece remains one of the more luridly depraved novels ever published. I’ve read Sade, Mandiargues, and others of their proclivity: Torture Garden, much more than rakish pornography, reduces their prurient fantasies to exactly that: fantasies. But in Torture Garden we glimpse the malice that flickers within the heart of real evil: within these pages, Mirbeau prophesies the horrors of genocide, social imperialism, and violence-for-violence's-sake. Some of the more disturbing episodes in the novel do not play out in the Torture Garden at all: the conversation between a British officer and a French explorer about the disposability of human beings—of Dum-Dum bullets and ‘civilized’ cannibalism, of the imminent goal of entirely eliminating both the physical and intangible existence of the ‘enemy’—remain as strikingly and singularly appalling as any gruesomely reprobate episode detailed from within the Torture Garden itself: and this despite the obvious satire (or perhaps even because of it) with which the scene is suffused. These pages drip with blood, yes—but also with cyanide.
I have discovered that Torture Garden’s ability to shock, stupefy, and disgust loses nothing upon rereading—if anything, this endless index of baroque debauchery and pornographic cruelty waxes ever-more loathsome, like a bit of maggot-eaten carrion whose sight, while nauseating, can never repulse as strongly as the noxious horror of its smell. But, for all this, it remains an unavoidably relevant novel—one we must read and reread, regardless of how it turns our stomachs and wounds our hearts. This is Torture Garden’s purpose: to awaken us to the tangible horror of existence, to the lies that pass as ‘truths’ and to the murders that pass as ‘inevitabilities,’ lest we should forget or—far worse—choose to ignore them. It is not with mere irony that Mirbeau prefaced his novel thusly: ‘To the priests, the soldiers, the judges: to those people who educate, instruct and govern men: I dedicate these pages of Murder and Blood.’
With its airy exoticism and heartless cruelty, its juxtaposition of indescribably violent torture and indescribably beautiful flowers, its excoriating anger and its electrifying sensuality, Torture Garden is not merely a classic of the Decadence, but a classic of the human soul. These grotesque and poisonous pages have etched themselves, for both better and worse, indelibly upon my brain: and for the bravest of readers, they will open onto vistas of incomparable truth: for beyond the Torture Garden lies a beauty that cannot be grasped without first glimpsing the barbarity with which it is inextricably bound.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Borg-mx5
I found this book interesting in its attempt to falsely moralize. This book was clearly intended to titilate, but is uses a patently false moral premise to paint its lurid tale of the beauty of torture and pain. The setting is China, in a time when this was a most exotic and strange part of the
Show More
world. Westerners visit a prison where Clara is brought to almost orgasmic pleasure by viewing the sufeering of chinese prisoners. It is not really political or moral. That is just the veneer for telling a story of violence with a hint of sadism. Show Less
LibraryThing member soliloquia
What concerns basic punctuation and outlook, this edition is not the best one. The Torture Garden is of curiosity value, but I was annoyed by the moralistic overtone and the strict polarity between good and evil the main character felt it was imperative to demonstrate ever so often. Interesting,
Show More
but telling the story through the mouth of a self-obsessed bourgeois man makes the outcome a bit thin. Show Less
LibraryThing member hansel714
The book is very queer because in place of fear of reverse colonization, Clara and the Weak Boy go to China. Their purpose isn't to colonize it. their purpose to preserve its cruelties. (Mirbeau is fetishizing China of course) The last part of the book reads more like the movie The Exorcist which
Show More
according to the book is a weekly affair. The strangeness of this book deserves great indepth analysis. Show Less
LibraryThing member jonfaith
Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren't the gods monsters? Isn't a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality
Curious about The Torture Garden? You may need a tall absinthe and a dearth of holiday cheer for a proper appreciation. That is not entirely accurate. Unlike the thrust of the decadent lettres, there isn't a default pose of ennui on display.
Passion pulses here. The manifestations of such are irregular, to say the least.
Such desire is maintained, and the novel remains, well, beautiful. The lush descriptions of the garden itself are exaustive and totalizing: a horticultural Eden despite the deaths of a thousand cuts and the carrion being offered to the deliriously starved.
I was impressed by the tone, which isn't sensational, but grounded and appreciative.
Show More
of things? Why, I too then, am a monster.Curious about The Torture Garden? You may need a tall absinthe and a dearth of holiday cheer for a proper appreciation. That is not entirely accurate. Unlike the thrust of the decadent lettres, there isn't a default pose of ennui on display.
Passion pulses here. The manifestations of such are irregular, to say the least.
Such desire is maintained, and the novel remains, well, beautiful. The lush descriptions of the garden itself are exaustive and totalizing: a horticultural Eden despite the deaths of a thousand cuts and the carrion being offered to the deliriously starved.
I was impressed by the tone, which isn't sensational, but grounded and appreciative.
Show Less
Language
Original publication date
1899
ISBN
9029531533 / 9789029531535