I picked this up on remainder, thinking it was something a bit different. Turns out that it's the story of a man, told at a gathering of debauched French bourgeois, of some of his time spent with an even more debauched Englishwoman, Clara. He's been shipped off to Ceylon to get him out of the hair of his mentor and he encounters Clara on the ship. She convinces him to sail on with her to China. He stays with her a while (no details), then apparently runs away in disgust for a couple of years (no details), then comes back and they visit the Torture Garden together. It's a prison where Chinese political prisoners are tortured in horrible ways, to Clara's excitement. I get that it's a condemnation of corrupt people, but the story suffers for it. The descriptions of the garden are very evocative, both the flowers and the flesh. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )