Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

Product Information

Reception and influence [ edit ] Title page of the 1926 first complete English translation with the caption "the book that Dorian Gray loved and that inspired Oscar Wilde". I knew what to expect going in, and was only pleasantly surprised at just how enjoyable an experience it proved to be. They were influenced by the Gothic novel and Edgar Allan Poe and liked writing about dandies, rich young men with nothing to do but be eccentric, weird and, well, decadent. The narrative is almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes's aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthesic sensory experiences.

The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming . Huysmans’ great A Rebour (perhaps better translated Against the Grain), is a mordantly brilliant plunge into the depths of modern decadence. I read the Muir translation of "The Metamorphosis" before I read the others--I have many issues with the Muir translation, so I'm always very discerning when looking for translations. His complete devotion to his Decadent lifestyle, in spite of his detrimental impact on his health, and despite the fact that it never really gives him the satisfaction he craves, is almost admirable. These included the notion of intense refinement; the valuing of artificiality over nature; a position of ennui or boredom rather than of moral earnestness or the valuing of hard work; an interest in perversity and paradox, and in transgressive modes of sexuality.

I picked this book up again last night, a favorite from grad school, a germinal novel of French decadence.

They were, for the most part, unintelligent, slavish dandies, successful dunces…who had nevertheless fulfilled the…stated aim of populating society with docile, pious creatures.

Fun fact: In Real Life, Huysmans was a civil servant and worked for the French Interior Ministry, on whose stationery he wrote his novels. Il avait touché aux repas charnels, avec un appétit d’homme quinteux, affecté de maladie, obsédé de fringales et dont le palais s’émousse et se blase vite; au temps où il compagnonnait avec les hobereaux, il avait participé à ces spacieux soupers où des femmes soûles se dégrafent au dessert et battent la table avec leur tête; il avait aussi parcouru les coulisses, tâté des actrices et des chanteuses, subi, en sus de la bêtise innée des femmes, la délirante vanité des cabotines; puis il avait entretenu des filles déjà célèbres et contribué à la fortune de ces agences qui fournissent, moyennant salaire, des plaisirs contestables; enfin, repu, las de ce luxe similaire, de ces caresses identiques il avait plongé dans les bas-fonds, espérant ravitailler ses désirs par le contraste, pensant stimuler ses sens assoupis par l’excitante malpropreté de la misère. Under the pretext of liberty and progress society had even discovered a means of aggravating the poor man’s miserable condition, by dragging him from his home, rigging him out in a ridiculous uniform, giving him his own weapons and brutalizing him under a system of slavery identical to that which it had, out of compassion, (abolished) in days gone by – all this to enable him to slaughter his neighbor without risking the scaffold like ordinary murderers who operate alone, without uniforms and with weapons that are less noisy and efficient. K. Huysmans and "The Strange Death of Europe" by Douglas Murray, which mentions the book "Au Rebours" and the author's journey to salvation, I decided I should try reading the book itself. but now, by leading him here, in the middle of a luxury the existence of which he hadn’t even suspected and which will engrave itself indelibly on his memory, by offering him…such a prize as this, he’ll get accustomed to the pleasures that are beyond his means to enjoy.

Orange/Blue Contrast: In the first chapter Des Esseintes redecorates his salon, seeking out interesting and unusual colors. Evil Stole My Faith: Courtesy of the pessimism of Schopenhauer, des Esseintes rejects belief in God for this reason, proclaiming: "If a God has made this world, I would not like to be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.

Yes, we’re talking about the great Joris Karl Huysmans, and the infamous A Rebours ( Against Nature).

To understand and appreciate this book, which by its very nature seems to reject the reader, or perhaps to withdraw from the reader any semblance of the forms of contact and intimacy that are the usual business of one person writing and another person reading the words, is to accept that the process by which we come together in this case is ultimately bizarre. And what point of contact could there be between him and this bourgeois class that had gradually taken over…it was now the aristocracy of money…the caliphate of the trade counter…the tyranny of commerce with its narrow, venal ideas, its self-serving and deceitful instincts. Quick precis: the final scion of a long decaying, inbreeding aristocratic family leaves society and shuts himself up in a large house where he lives, eats, and breathes decadently. He claimed no cures, offered the sick no compensation, no hope; but when all was said and done, his theory of Pessimism was the great comforter of superior minds and lofty souls; it revealed society as it was, insisted on the innate stupidity of women, pointed out the pitfalls of life, saved you from disillusionment by teaching you to expect as little as possible, to expect nothing at all if you were sufficiently strong-willed, indeed, to consider yourself lucky if you were not constantly visited by some unforeseen calamity" (Huysmans 2003, p. in 16°, brossura con sovracoperta illustrata (riproduzione in bianco e nero di «Salomé» di Gustave Moreau), pp.I read it in the Robert Baldick translation, from 1959 and put out by Penguin, and as I’d earlier this summer loved Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary, I thought maybe I’d see about rereading a newer translation.