Torture Garden

Product Description
Once described as “the most sickening work of art of the nineteenth century”, Mirbeau’s classic novel follows a young man’s journey to the ends of desire and depravity in a garden in China where torture is practiced as a work of art.
Review
“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
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Torture Garden, written by Octave Mirbeau in 1899, is one of the most extreme books ever to be published. Ostensibly dealing with the theme of torture as a refined art form in China, and depicting a dissolute bureaucrat led by an extraordinary woman into the depths of depravity, this is an absolute black humor critique of the values of Western Civilization with its duplicitous rules of social conduct and political power-brokering. A totally contemporary indictment of corruption in government, this work also lays bare the politics of the conservative scientific establishment and the evil inherent in bureaucracy. Additionally, the Colonialist mentality with its brutish institutionalized killings of natives and animals is vividly contrasted with the exquisite tortures of the garden.
The glittering, fantastic Torture Garden itself has all the hallucinatory brightness of a dream straight form the unconscious-that fertile pool nourishing the uninhibited artistic imagination. There seems a direct lineage of descent from the horrific painted visions of Bosch to the written splendors of Mirbeau’s work. Both appear steeped in enigma and allusion, fed from the same inexhaustible springs of diabolical invention that well up from deep within the human psyche-the eternal playground of sex and death.
This book offers a rare portrait of a woman of intelligence and sensitivity who progressively reveals greater dimensions of curiosity, courage, honesty and philosophic overview as she relentlessly pursues more complex and challenging experiences. In the process the much-vaunted corruption and worldly wisdom of the European male narrator is unmasked as paltry cowardice and worse still-moral conservatism that is pathetically shallow. His is a petty little soul and hers the soul of a great adventuress.
Written at a time when all authoritarian “laws” of aesthetics and morality were being challenged (and breached) by anarchists, Decadents, Naturalists, Impressionists, and pre-Surrealists, The Torture Garden appended its vision of terminal outrage to the final year of the nineteenth century. The author, Octave Mirbeau (1850-1917) was an exceptional writer who combined intensity of vision with a lifelong commitment to attacking arbitrary, unjust authority. As a journalist Mirbeau railed against conservative art and political opinions as well as hypocritical public figures-which caused him to fight numerous duels. Till the end of his long career as a critic, novelist and playwright he was dedicated to permanent, sardonic, and vociferous rebellion against the status quo. He and his wife, a former actress and herself a luminary of wit and independence, held host to some of the most radical artists and writers of the day. After his death she made their estate a retreat and haven for indignant writers, artists, poets and sculptors possessing dreams and visions but little else.
As a critique of society The Torture Garden is an enduring inspiration: “You’re obliged to pretend respect f