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    Torture Garden
    Torture Garden
    Torture Garden
    Ebook243 pages3 hours

    Torture Garden

    By Octave Mirbeau and Brian Stableford

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    'This hideously decadent fin de siecle novel has become an underground classic. There are satirical and allegorical dimensions, but it remains irreducibly horrible.' Phil Baker in The Sunday Times

    ' First published in 1898 this decadent classic flays civilised society down to its hypocritical bones and is le dernier cri in kinky exoticism.' Anne Billson in Time Out"

    ' The Torture Garden by Mirbeau: a quite stunning investigation into the furthest extremities of physical love. Almost post-modern in style and structure, it is a genuinely intelligent, and therefore deeply unsettling, work.' Philip Kane in The Independent on Sunday

    '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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDedalus Ebooks
    Release dateApr 26, 2013
    ISBN9781909232396
    Torture Garden
    Author

    Octave Mirbeau

    Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) war ein französischer Journalist, Kunstkritiker, Romanautor und eine der bedeutendsten Persönlichkeiten der französischen Belle Epoque.Als anarchistischer Schriftsteller lehnte er Naturalismus und Symbolismus ab. Seine Komödie Geschäft ist Geschäft gehörte nach 1903 zu den meistgespielten Stücken an deutschen Theatern. Zitat von Leo Tolstoi: Octave Mirbeau ist der grösste französische Schriftsteller unserer Zeit und derjenige, der in Frankreich den Geist des Jahrhunderts am besten repräsentiert.

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    Reviews for Torture Garden

    3.5/5

    4 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      I like to think I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to books, but this has to be one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. Mirbeau's juxtaposition of pain and flowers, beauty and repulsiveness, love and death, is at the same time beautiful and horrific. The book itself is well written and the story is intriguing: it explores the basest instincts of human beings, and how all of us have a dark, bestial side we either supress or foster (the torture garden section reminded me of the farm in the Sin City comics). I am glad I read this book. I felt that it raised many uncomfortable questions about human nature that people prefer to ignore, but doubt I'll read it again. I would recommend it to anyone interested in human behavior or decadent literature, but it's not for the faint of heart, this one.
    • 4/5
      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 according to the book is a weekly affair. The strangeness of this book deserves great indepth analysis.
    • 2/5
      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, but telling the story through the mouth of a self-obsessed bourgeois man makes the outcome a bit thin.

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    Torture Garden - Octave Mirbeau

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