Reviews for No Pain, No Gain

The average rating for No Pain, No Gain based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-15 00:00:00 Douglas Drake This one is defeating me as far as creating a formal review is concerned, so let me just instead tell you why I stuck with it, and why I may have been in a prime position to enjoy it as much as I did. Well, 'enjoy' is probably not the right word, because it is certainly not tons of fun to read. It's sexually-charged violence which explores the fork-tongued, heads-in-the-sand nature of the West in relation to its methods of maintaining order, punishing crime, and Civilizing the Natives the world over. Yes, it is certainly that. At the same time, it is also an exploration of the razor-wire between lust and violence, and our addiction, as human beings entangled with one another in various attempts at real embraces, to desiring what we can't have while rejecting what we can or do; the feelings of repulsion that sometimes go with affection, the malaise that sets in. I have historically had trouble finding a middle gray between the romantic polarities. What starts out for me as excitement and intoxication often quickly devolves into shoe-fly irritation, depression, and a crippling desire for isolation. My suppression and denial of these urges and inclinations has repeatedly led to pain for myself and others. I wait too long without saying anything about the horrors in my brain until one day I explode in one way or another, be it hurtful words or even more hurtful actions. I'm not saying this is always the case, of course; it can also go the other way, and it's me who is all starry-eyed and really trying to force it to work, to make it fit like Cinderella's stepsisters and that one shoe. Every single time I have actually been optimistic and really given it my all, I have been the one crushed under the boot. What to do? Is it possible to stare my demons in the face and scare them away completely, surrounding myself with a circle of magical glitter dust that makes me impervious to...myself? Do I conform my shape to what I have been given as a result of my life and myriad experiences, both wonderful and horrible, and just run with the hyenas shamelessly until one of them completely extracts my still-beating heart and eats it while I watch in horror? Should I just hide in a room forever because you people/myself all terrify me? Jesus, where's the middle-ground? Well, Mirbeau doesn't exactly claim that there really is one, but then again he's working at mushing extremes here, presenting them as symbiotic. It's all masquerading cruelty. We crave punishment because of its erotic nature resulting from the simultaneous births of both bloodshed and sexuality. We so often desire what we cannot have because that desire is self-feeding, virulent and primal, while comfortable, chaos-free intimacy can be numbing specifically due to its lack of friction and self-laceration. These are possibilities presented by Mirbeau, not me. Aren't they awful? Well, I'm still tossing the complexities of intimacy around, and this book aided me in doing that. Uncomfortably. That is why I can say I am glad I read it rather than that I enjoyed reading it, despite the fact that it was beautifully written even in translation. It shined a flashlight inside of my open chest and straight to my icky little ticker, grabbed me by the hair, and forced me to look while screaming a spit-ridden "TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE!" The juxtaposition of passion and destruction just resonated with me, as did the extremes of beauty and internal suffering. "Why are we so self-defeating, and how can we be so ugly to each other sometimes?" is a lot of what is asked here, and the behavior of these characters and their interactions with one another--a sadistic woman revealing the truth of herself to her horrified and stupefied lover--is presented as a case study exploring these difficult questions. The novel made me really look at myself and the people I've known and cared for, scary and queasiness-inducing as it may have been. I mean, it depressed the shit out of me, but that's not something I make a point of avoiding in literature. Speaking of which, check out this 'pot of gold at the end of the rainbow' metaphor for romantic love: Come, my dears, come quickly. Where you are going there is still more pain, more torture, more blood flowing and dripping on the earth, more contorted and torn bodies breathing their last on iron tables...more ragged flesh swaying on the gallows-rope, more horror and more hell. Come, my loves, lip to lip and hand in hand. And look between the foliage and the lattice-work, look at the infernal diorama unfolding, and the diabolical festival of death! The power of positive thinking, right? Ope, looks like a storm is coming...

Review # 2 was written on 2010-11-05 00:00:00 Ellen Redmon Wherever it appears, civilisation shows this face of sterile blood and forever dead ruins. The Torture Garden is a gloomy and sinister satire about the inhuman brutality of humankind. The novel is aesthetically decadent and whimsically fanciful. Honesty is inactive and sterile; it does not know how to evaluate appetites and ambitions, the only desires in which something durable is found. To be honest doesn't pay and the only way to power in society is the unrestricted malevolence… The future seemed sadder and more desperate than winter twilight falling over the sick patient's bedroom. And what new infamy would the wretched minister propose after dinner? How much deeper did he want to plunge me into the mire from which one did not return, causing me to vanish forever? And from this hopeless point of departure the narrator embarked on his dramatic journey through the cosmic atrocity and meanness. And the smells rising from the crowd - the smells of toilet and abattoir combined, the stench of carrion and the sweat of living flesh - sank my spirits and chilled me to the bone. I often felt the same lethargic torpor at evening in the Annam forests while the miasmas rose up from the deep humus and death lay in wait behind each flower, each leaf and each blade of grass. My breath almost failed me and I felt I was about to faint. The civilized world is a place of merciless torture skillfully disguised as a wondrous garden.