Customer Reviews:
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 Amazing. A masterpiece. October 7, 2000
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
There is not much to write on this book. It truley is a masterpiece. I cannot believe one mind can write such an amazing book. Its so compelling....even when your brain tells you to be disgusted or scared, and look away,you cannot help but read more and more, and feel sickened but strangely educated by it all.. amazing. BUY IT! NOW!
 Kind of good, but always bad May 21, 2000
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
Good, but I personally think it isn't really relevant to society today. Maybe some people see beauty in death and torture. However when the book focused on corruption in society it seemed more scathing and accurate. There are some fine passages in the book, but overall there is far too much of the book which is not important.
 A wonderful, sometimes horrific but fascinating book.... July 6, 1998
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Torture garden has been compared to the Marquis de Sade. It begins quite normal, a drawing room discussion, the subject however is murderers and their role in society. After this it develops into the most cruel book i've ever read, a decadent story that ends in the Torture Garden, a chinese garden with the most horrific tortures imaginable. Distorted views on beauty, mixed with blood and flowers. Life is as important as death. "Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love glory, heroism, and religion: these are it's monstrous flowers and it's hideous instruments of eternal human suffering" Octave Mirbeau is an original and powerful writer. Underneath the surface of this book lies his motive, to expose the hypocrisies of society; to shock the reader into a realisation that much of what he takes for granted is cruel and ugly. Like Sade, Mirbeau was an atheist, and at that time that was something outrageous. he knew what good and evil was, but what bothered him was that in the so called civilised society, so much evil was portrayed as good, and most people didn't notice or care. In torture garden he set out to show people what their world, behind it's hypocrisies, was really like.
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