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Title: The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau, Alvah C. Bessie ISBN: 0-9651042-6-5 Publisher: Juno Books Pub. Date: 31 August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (6 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: This book was poor
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: Beautifully written
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: ...the most sickening work of art of the nineteenth century.
Comment: "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.
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Title: Maldoror and the Complete Works by Lautreamont, Alexis Lykiard, Comte De Lautreamont, Lautreamont Chants De Maldoror, Lautreamont Poesies, Conte de Lautreamont, Comte De Lautreamont ISBN: 187897212X Publisher: Exact Change Pub. Date: July, 1994 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, Joachim Neugroschel ISBN: 0872862097 Publisher: City Lights Books Pub. Date: September, 1987 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Venus in Furs (Penguin Classics) by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, Joachim Neugroschel, Larry Wolff ISBN: 0140447814 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 05 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France by Asti Hustvedt ISBN: 1890951072 Publisher: Zone Books Pub. Date: 18 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $34.00 |
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Title: Flesh Unlimited by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon ISBN: 1840680156 Publisher: Creation Pub Group Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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