Against Nature

By J.-K. Huysmans

Against Nature is Huysmans's great fin-de-siècle novel anticipating many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarmé and Poe. 'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As J -K Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other.
The hero, des Esseintes, is a neurasthenic aristocrat who has turned his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreated to an isolated country villa. Here, accompanied only by a couple of silent servants, he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems, and complex perfumes and embarks on a series of increasingly strange aesthetic experiments, starting with the decision to give his giant pet tortoise a jewel-encrusted shell...

"Huysmans' study of obsession and aesthetics got up no end of reviewers' noses on its 1884 publication. It�s not hard to see why: decadent aristocrat Jean Floressas des Esseintes, afflicted by nerves so grievous they cause his spine to freeze when he sees a servant wringing out washing, takes turns kicking out at classical poets, modern novelists and the church. The poor are grotesque, the rich are decaying and the bourgeoisie simply insufferable. Only Dickens, Baudelaire and the odd enema provide respite. Cloistered in an opulent house in the suburbs of Paris, Des Esseintes undertakes a series of experiments in living which prove to be an absolute hoot. He decorates an unfortunate tortoise with precious stones, tries to go to England, but only makes it as far as a nearby pub, and attempts to turn an urchin into a killer by buying him credit at a brothel. This largely plotless mix of bilious satire, broad comedy and literary criticism may have lost some of its immediacy, but it remains a captivating, contradictory work of art." James Smart in The Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dedalus Ebooks
• Release date: Feb 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781907650314

J.-K. Huysmans

J.-K. Huysmans (1847-1907) changed from being an obscure author and art critic to one of the most famous authors of his day with the publication of A Rebours (Against Nature) in 1884. A Rebours is a ground-breaking novel which captures the decadent spirit of the day and marks his final break with Zola and naturalism. Dedalus have published 12 books by J.-K. Huysmans, 11 in new translations by Brendan King; Marthe, Parisian Sketches, The Vatard Sisters, Stranded (En Rade), Drifting, Against Nature, Las Bas, Modern Art, Certain Artists, The Cathedral and The Oblate of St Benedict. In addition to an old translation of En Route which will be replaced by a new translation by Brendan King in 2023. Robert Baldick's brilliant book The Life of J.-K. Huysmans was published by Dedalus in the autumn of 2005, updated and edited by Brendan King.

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Decadence from Dedalus

General Editor: Mike Mitchell

Against Nature

J.-K. Huysmans

Against Nature

(Á rebours)

Translated with an introduction and notes by Brendan King

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

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Publishing History

First published in France in 1884

First published by Dedalus in 2008

First e-book edition 2011

Introduction, notes and translation © copyright Brendan King 2008

The right of Brendan King to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988

Printed in Finland by WS Bookwell

Typeset by Refine Catch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

THE TRANSLATOR

Brendan King is a freelance writer, reviewer and translator with a special interest in late nineteenth-century French fiction. He recently completed his Ph.D. on the life and work of J.-K. Huysmans.

His other translations for Dedalus include Là-bas, Parisian Sketches, and Marthe, and he also edited the Dedalus edition of The Life of J.-K. Huysmans by Robert Baldick.

He lives in Paris.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Note on the translation

Select bibliography in English

Against Nature (1884)

Preface written twenty years afterwards

Notes

Manuscript variants

INTRODUCTION

The publication of J.-K. Huysmans’ A rebours (Against Nature) caused something of a minor sensation when it first appeared in 1884. As the author himself observed in a special preface to the novel written twenty years afterwards, the book ‘fell like a meteorite into the literary fairground and caused consternation and anger; the press was beside itself.’ It was not that the book was a bestseller in the traditional sense of the term – Huysmans would have to wait another fourteen years and the publication of La Cathédrale (The Cathedral) before his income from writing outstripped his salary as a government functionary – but its provocative flouting of social, moral and aesthetic conventions made it a book that couldn’t be ignored. Of the forty or so reviews that appeared in French newspapers in the wake of its publication there were many that were violently hostile, a few that were fervently enthusiastic, but none that were completely indifferent. Huysmans had spent the previous two years predicting disaster for the book, but for once his habitual pessimism was refuted rather than reinforced by the reality of events. As he explained in an interview written pseudonymously for the paper Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui (Men of Today) in 1885, ‘I thought I was writing for about ten people, opening a kind of secret book that was inaccessible to fools; but to my great surprise I found that thousands of people all around the world were in a state of mind analogous to my own.’

If the novel’s success exceeded the author’s expectations, its cultural impact has also gone far beyond that of the succès de scandale it initially enjoyed. However strange and disjointed it may have seemed to contemporary reviewers, Against Nature gave form and substance to a certain nebulous spirit of the times which up until then had remained undefined. As a result, the novel was enthusiastically taken up by a number of young artists and writers, who saw it as a source of inspiration for a set of ideas and values that coalesced into Decadence, a literary and artistic movement that became emblematic of fin-de-siècle France. As the book’s reputation radiated out from Paris and spread across Europe, its ideas began to influence the literature of other countries too, especially in England and Italy, which each produced their own distinctive Decadence movements.

In the century following its publication, the novel’s uncompromising attitude to art and literature has had a dramatic impact on successive generations of writers and artists – and almost single-handedly redefined the cultural canon of nineteenth century France in the process. Certainly the status of poets such as Mallarmé, Verlaine and Baudelaire, and artists such as Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau – all of whom were seen as marginal cultural figures at the time the novel was published – would be very different today if Against Nature had never been written.

To most of Huysmans’ contemporaries, the notion that Against Nature would have had a lasting influence on European literature, that it would gain for itself the status of an iconoclastic work in the literary history of the nineteenth century, would have been difficult to comprehend. To their eyes the book had next to no plot, a single, unpleasant – if not downright immoral – leading character who was neurotic, self-obsessed and, what was worse, an effete aristocrat. Taken as a whole, this so-called novel seemed to be composed of a series of bizarre aesthetic speculations and analyses that not only defied the stylistic conventions of the novel form, but ran counter to the prevailing orthodoxies of literary and artistic taste. A review in the Revue Catholique for 15 July 1884 gives an idea of the kind of feelings the book inspired in the average middle-class reader:

M. Huysmans is one of the principal pupils and imitators of M. Zola. Here’s what he’s come up with: his novel has only one character, a young man who is worn out by every conceivable pleasure, has rents of 50,000 francs, and who decides to retire from society because that society is guilty of wearing him out! He decides to furnish his house: then follows a description and enumeration of all the colours one can choose to decorate a house, ten pages of colours. He decorates his house with flowers: then follows a description and enumeration of all the flowers you can get, twenty pages of flowers. These flowers give off various scents: then follows a description and enumeration of all the smells they exhale, thirty pages of smells. He forms a library: then follows a description and enumeration of all the books he has in his library, fifty pages of books. Etc., etc. The young man continues in this fashion … until he decides to cure himself. Then follows a description and enumeration of all the medicaments and enemas he administers from morning to night … He still isn’t cured. And after that? Nothing, that’s it. It’s absurd! It’s stupid, you say. Yes, but if you only knew how tiresome it is!

Against Nature is one of the successes of Naturalist literature, and Naturalist literature is the literature of the Republic.

Unrepresentative as it might be of the whole range of critical responses to Against Nature at the time – some reviewers at least appreciated the novel’s originality and power even if they didn’t like or understand its subject matter – the last line of the review nevertheless provides a clue as to why the book tended to produce divergent and often extreme responses in its readers, whether of admiration or of contempt. Since the establishment of the Third Republic in the wake of the violent and bloody repression of the Commune, a moderate Republican government had been trying to keep the peace between two opposing ideological factions: extreme left-wing Republicans who wanted to see through the programme of the French Revolution on one side, and a mixture of reactionary Catholics and monarchists who wanted to see a restoration of more traditional, hierarchical social structures on the other. This fault-line running through French political life progressively deepened during the 1880s, as Catholics and Republicans fought to impose their respective, but mutually irreconcilable, visions of France. The critic for the Revue Catholique clearly judged Huysmans’ novel against this backdrop of political tension and division. For him, Huysmans was a Naturalist and therefore a Republican, and his novel was representative of what he saw as the worst aspects of an innately anti-clerical, anti-Catholic Republic. Against Nature was what happens when the strict morality of the Church is relaxed and the individual is left to his own devices.

This was not, of course, the only response to the novel. Indeed, as Huysmans himself pointed out at the time, his book seemed to have antagonised everyone:

By the letters I’ve received and the noise that’s reached me, I see there’s a general furore! I’ve trodden on everyone’s corns: the Catholics are exasperated, while others accuse me of being a cleric in disguise… the Romantics are outraged by the attacks on Hugo, Gautier and Leconte de Lisle; the Naturalists by the contempt shown for the modern novel …

(Letter to Zola, May 1884)

Perhaps because Huysmans’ own views about contemporary social and political developments were in a transitional phase – in the late 1870s he had exalted the modern as the proper subject of art, but by the end of the 1880s he saw it as synonymous with crassness and ugliness – there is a certain ambiguity at the heart of the novel. Should Against Nature be read as an apologia for des Esseintes, was it proposing him as a role model, or was it making fun of him? In default of any clear intention on the part of the author, many contemporary readers ended up interpreting the book in the light of their own assumptions or prejudices. Certain writers associated with the Naturalist movement, such as Paul Alexis, Jules Destrée and Gustave Geoffroy, tended to see the book within a specifically Naturalist framework: Alexis, for example, ridiculed Léon Bloy for taking des Esseintes’ mystical enthusiasms at face value rather than as symptoms of a neurotic illness (Le Reveil, 22 June 1884), while Destrée described the novel in straight forward terms as a ‘magisterial study of neurosis and decadence’ in which the ‘mad dreams of an artist are analysed with a scientific acuity and a precision of detail that give them life and the illusion of reality’ (Journal de Charleroi, 21 November 1884).

By contrast, unorthodox Catholics such as Léon Bloy and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, writers who were fiercely opposed to the scientific and materialistic ideas on which Naturalism was founded, saw the book as a devastating analysis of a society putrefied by materialist values. Bloy, in his typically hyperbolic fashion, noted that Against Nature presented two alternative views of life, one can either ‘stuff one’s face like a beast, or contemplate the face of God’, and that Huysmans, ‘formerly a Naturalist now a spiritualist of the most mystical kind, had distanced himself from the crapulous Zola as much as if all of interplanetary space had suddenly accumulated between them’ (Le Chat noir, 14 June 1884). Barbey d’Aurevilly’s infamous review went even further and after remarking that Huysmans seemed to be detaching himself from the ‘soulless, clueless photographic realists who make up the Naturalist school’, ended with the same prophetic challenge he had made years before to Baudelaire on the publication of Les Fleurs de mal: that after such a book, there logically remained only the barrel of a gun or the foot of the Cross: ‘Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross; but what will the author of Against Nature choose?’ (Le Pays, 29 July 1884).

Whether the book was taken as a critique of Naturalism or as an unhealthy product of it, it is clear that the novel’s critics and commentators saw the issue of Naturalism not in terms of a narrow debate about a literary movement, but rather as a convenient shorthand for a much larger set of political questions about the role of the individual within society and, ultimately, how that society was ordered. Although Huysmans wasn’t a political writer in an overt sense – his novels were not polemical in the way Zola’s were, and he didn’t publicly ally himself with any particular political party – it was nevertheless the case that during the 1870s he had been an integral member of a literary movement seen to be on the left of the political spectrum, a movement whose books attacked the institutions and the values of the middle class, and which was intrinsically hostile to the Catholic Church. To those sensitive to the way the political wind was blowing, the publication of Against Nature seemed to signal a change in the author’s political commitment, with its criticisms of Naturalism, its contempt for the ‘democratisation’ of art and literature, and its privileging of an artistic and social élite. Huysmans’ original title for the novel was Seul (Alone). The decision to change it to A rebours – which in French means going backwards or against the grain of things – is significant in that it shifts the symbolic focus of the book away from the solipsism of the individual, it contextualises des Esseintes’ existential crisis against the backdrop of the wider contemporary sphere and places him in opposition to the current political and social order of things.

It is no accident that Huysmans himself should have described the book as ‘exploding like a grenade’ (Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui). The ideological battle lines between those on the left and the right had been drawn, and the field of literature was just as much a combat zone as the Chamber of Deputies, the town hall or the pulpit. When Huysmans published Against Nature, it wasn’t just a literary movement he seemed to be rejecting, it was his tacit allegiance to the ideology that went with it. In prioritising the élite over the popular, the singular over the general, and the unique and the rare over objects of mass production, Against Nature stood against what Zola and many of the Naturalists considered to be the forces of progress and allied itself, albeit in an idiosyncratic and abrasive fashion, with those in society who believed in a hierarchical, non-egalitarian social order. The novel therefore represented a movement away from the values of a left-leaning secular Republic and constituted Huysmans’ first public step towards a form of reactionary Catholicism that he would later fully embrace following his conversion in 1892. Writers on the political right such as Barbey d’Aurevilly and Bloy recognised it immediately. And so, too, did Zola.

Writing Against Nature

Huysmans began writing Against Nature in the late summer or early autumn of 1882. His previous novel, A vau-l’eau (With the Flow), which recounted the depressed and depressing life of Jean Folantin, a self-confessed failure whose philosophy of life is summed up in the final words of the book, ‘only the worst happens’, had been published on the 26 January of that year, so in creative terms Huysmans was at something of a loose end. Although he had written to the Belgian author Camille Lemonnier at the end of 1881 to say he was working on a novel called Le Gros Caillou, this was not so much a serious project as a kind of literary makeshift which consisted in trying to develop and expand a short story he’d already published in 1880. As it turned out the novel never got beyond the first chapter and within a few months he confessed he had given it up. In a letter to Guy de Maupassant, written in March, Huysmans admitted he wasn’t working on anything, ‘being completely incapable of stitching two ideas together’. The impetus for a new burst of creative energy was probably a visit in the spring to Jutigny, where he went with his long-standing mistress, Anna Meunier. It was here that he saw the Chateau de Lourps for the first time, a partially ruined chateau which not only served as the model for des Esseintes’ ancestral home in Against Nature, but also formed the backdrop to Huysmans’ subsequent novel En rade (At Harbour) of 1887.

The image of the crumbling ruin of the Chateau de Lourps provided a dramatic contrast to the refined ‘thebaid’ of the stately provincial house in Fontenay-aux-Roses where Huysmans had spent three months convalescing after a bout of neuralgia the previous year. Although there is nothing to suggest that the idea for Against Nature came to him at Fontenay, it is clear that his experiences there – he divided his time between re-reading Baudelaire and planting ‘almost artificial’ flowers in a garden in which ‘nothing has the air of being real’ – provided a rich fund of source material for the novel. The letters he wrote to Théodore Hannon at the time are full of ideas that later reappeared in the novel, and on his return to Paris he published a ‘Parisian sketch’ entitled ‘Pantin’ that played with the notion of real flowers and artificial perfumes and which he later incorporated into Against Nature with only minor changes. In his imagination, the two houses became symbols that functioned on both a political and an existential level: the Chateau de Lourps came to represent an older social order, grander and more refined, but one that was moribund, weakened by aristocratic in-breeding and debauchery, and unable to compete with a commercially-minded bourgeoisie; by contrast, Fontenay became the artificial ‘thebaid’, a retreat in which des Esseintes could escape from the commercialised demands of modern life, a space in which he could re-invent himself and shape an artificial world more suited to his refined aesthetic tastes.

The first reference to the new novel in Huysmans’ correspondence comes in a letter to Stephane Mallarmé of 27 October 1882, in which he asks the poet for help in finding copies of his books, as he wants to refer to some of his poems:

I am in the process of hatching a pretty unusual story, the subject of which is as follows: the last scion of a noble line takes refuge – out of disgust at the Americanisation of life, out of contempt for the aristocracy of money that has invaded us – in complete solitude. He is a cultured man of the most refined delicacy. In his comfortable thebaid, he tries to find a way of replacing the monotonous boredom of nature by means of artifice, he amuses himself with authors from the exquisite and penetrating Roman decadence – I use the word decadence in order to be understood – he even charges off into the Latinity of the Church; into the barbarous, delicious poems of Orientius, Véranius du Gévaudan, Baudonivia, etc., etc. In the French language, he’s mad about Poe, Baudelaire, the second half of La Faustin. You can see where it’s going.

Huysmans’ succinct precis of the book’s subject, which closely mirrors that of the finished novel, shows that the general outline of Against Nature must have come to him at an early stage in the writing, or that he had already been working on the book for a few months before he mentioned it to anyone. Certainly ideas for the book were starting to come to him around this time. In a letter to the Belgian publisher Henry Kistemaeckers on 23 August, for example, Huysmans refers to his recent trip to Jutigny, and, a propos of travelling in general, notes that:

It is just like London. If one buys one’s clothes in Old England, reads Dickens and goes to drink port at The Bodega, one can easily imagine that one is on a journey, visiting that diabolical city …

This is clearly an early version of the conceit that forms chapter XI of the novel, that of des Esseintes’ imaginary trip to London.

In any event, whether Huysmans began the novel in August or September – in late September 1883 he remarked in a letter to Lucien Descaves that it was time he finished the book as he’d been working on it ‘for almost a year’ – it is significant to note that Zola wasn’t the first person he chose to tell about his new literary project. In fact, he didn’t tell Zola about the new direction his work was taking until mid-November:

With the return of the cold weather, I feel better – I have started writing again – plunged into a kind of bizarre fantasy-novel, a piece of neurotic craziness which will, I believe, be something new, but which will necessitate my immediate confinement in the Charenton mental asylum. I have put aside for the moment Le Gros Caillou, which wasn’t going as well as I wanted and which I’ll start again when I’m in a different state of mind. I positively feel the need to put myself out to graze in some black and furious fantasy, mad but real all the same.

This letter shows not just that Huysmans didn’t keep Zola up to date about his work at this period, but that he wasn’t entirely truthful about its progress and direction either. He only tells him in November, for example, that he has given up working on Le Gros Caillou, when we know he had abandoned it in March, and when he does talk about his new work he gives a much vaguer account of the form and substance of the novel than he had given to Mallarmé.

Even at this early stage in its development it is clear that Huysmans was uneasy about how Zola would receive the novel, that he was aware it represented a serious deviation from Zola’s ideas and those of the movement to which he nominally belonged. In his subsequent letters to Zola, Huysmans adopts a persistently dismissive tone towards the novel, as if trying to reassure him about it or play down its importance in his eyes. Huysmans knew that in writing Against Nature he was indulging in a rebellious act, but it is as if he is not quite prepared to take responsibility for it, and frequently gives the impression to his correspondents that the novel is writing itself, almost against his wishes.

Certainly by the early years of the 1880s Huysmans felt that the Naturalist movement as it was popularly conceived had run its course, and he was looking for ways in which to incorporate in his fiction experiences and sensations which Naturalism, with its ostensibly materialist underpinnings, was ill-equipped to deal with. In the course of 1883 we can see Huysmans trying to put some distance between his own philosophical position and that of Zola’s. In a review of Huysmans’ collection of art criticism, L’Art moderne (Modern Art), which appeared in Le Parlement of 31 May 1883, Paul Bourget had remarked in passing that:

This book is called L’Art moderne and its author is J.-K. Huysmans, one of those novelists whom public opinion has classed, without knowing why, under the ambiguous epithet Naturalist. Huysmans has no other trait in common with Zola or Maupassant except having written a short story in the collection Soirées de Médan …

Although this was the only reference to Zola in the review, Huysmans immediately seized on it, and at the beginning of June he wrote a fulsome letter to the critic:

I am particularly grateful to you, my dear friend, for having pointed out that I am in no way a pupil of Zola’s, as everyone else says. Lord, we have no ideas in common, neither in painting nor literature. Even so, there will probably be general astonishment when the bizarre novel I am working on – and which couldn’t be less Naturalistic, at least in the vulgar sense of the word – appears. I hope that you’ll like it, because I often think of you in relation to certain chapters on orchids and combinations of perfumes, on furniture and painting. These will barely be comprehensible to the general public, inasmuch as this carnal, mystical book is veiled under a muslin that lets no hint of violence or the extreme through, but beneath which I hope its sentences will evoke a certain elevation in refined readers like you.

The notion of refinement becomes a recurring motif in Huysmans’ thinking at this time. If there was one thing Zola wasn’t in Huysmans’ eyes it was refined, and he was inclined to regard Zola’s tastes, especially his household furnishings, as bourgeois, even vulgar. The words ‘raffiné’ and ‘raffinement’ crop up frequently in his letters during the early 1880s and, as if to define himself in opposition to Zola, he described himself as ‘an inexplicable amalgam of a refined Parisian and a Dutch painter’ in his pseudo-interview for Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui. Significantly such cultural refinement tends to be predicated on a political and economic system that is at odds with the values of egalitarianism and democracy.

Reading Huysmans’ letter to Bourget and its enumeration of the various chapters on styling and furnishing, one is inevitably reminded of Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un artiste, an exercise in cultural refinement in which the writer’s house is described room by room, its fine antiques and objets d’art catalogued and classified. La Maison was clearly an influence on the early chapters of Against Nature. Goncourt had sent Huysmans a copy of the book in early 1881 and the younger writer’s letter of thanks shows he was taken with the style of alternating chapters of description, and was flattered that Goncourt had included him in his library of contemporary books – something which probably gave him the idea of including the names of authors he admired in his inventory of des Esseintes’ library.

By the end of November 1883, Huysmans had almost finished the book. As he put it to Zola:

For my part, I am still harnessed to my absurd book; but I am starting the last chapter, the end of the end. It’s true that I still have a lot of tying up to do. I’ve really got myself stuffed into a frightful wasps’ nest with this novel with only one character and no dialogue. It’ll be deadly boring – literally – I’m more and more convinced of it. Anyway, it’s done; I now just want to get rid of it as quickly as possible so I can get on with my novel La Faim, which will give me more scope.

Again, he seems unable to be completely straight with Zola. Not only does he disparage his new book – in a letter to Théodore Hannon a few months later he boasted that his novel was ‘a book that would astonish the world, a book beyond anything that had yet been conceived’ – he also holds out the idea that when it is finished he will return to a more ostensibly Naturalist mode of writing, La Faim (The Hunger) being his novel about the Siege of Paris. In the event, his next novel was not La Faim – which was never finished and which he burned shortly before his death – but En rade, another work in which he tried to incorporate extreme non-Naturalist elements and which he again denigrated in his subsequent letters to Zola.

After the publication of Against Nature, Zola was quick to respond. In a long letter of the 20th of May, he set out his thoughts about the novel, nuancing his positive comments with minor criticisms, and then increasingly giving rein to his feelings of unease:

My dear Huysmans,

I finished Against Nature and I want straight away to give you my sincere impressions.

Beginning very clear, which pleased me infinitely, above all the pages on the Chateau, the bits about the Voulzie, the move to Fontenay very interesting, the pages on colours, the fitting up of the Dining Room with the aquarium, and the hasty voyages made in imagination during meal times. Of the three chapters on literature, the one on Latin Decadence is the one I prefer: there are superb pages in it, written in a grand style, but you have pushed eloquence so far that certain paragraph breaks get lost in the course of the declaration. A bit confusing, too. As for the chapter on contemporary religious literature, I think you have given too much praise to those charlatans; I except Barbey. As for us others, in the end we’re there a little through the indulgence of the author, are we not? Des Esseintes communes very amusingly in Mallarmé. An interesting description of Baudelaire. The tortoise – exquisite, especially with his hanging of jewels, which is a nice refinement. A very bourgeois thought came to me: it’s lucky it died, because it would have crapped on the carpet. An amusing fancy that of the mouth organ, though not easy to imagine as a physical mechanism. Some fine pages of artistic criticism on the painters des Esseintes prefers. Personally, I’ve only a slight interest in Gustave Moreau. I laughed at the stupidity of the woman who wanted to live in a rotunda and what happened to the rounded furniture. I found the story of Auguste Langlois a little laborious, especially as there’s no conclusion. But des Esseintes’ love life entranced me: the acrobat, and above all the ventriloquist, oh, the ventriloquist! it’s a poem … Very colourful pages on plants, even if a little confused, strewn with a few errors, I think. I prefer the section on perfumes, which is absolutely successful, with a magisterial certitude and a lyrical fantasy. As a complete chapter in itself, the voyage to London is a marvel. There is an extraordinary beating rain in it. You have a feeling for rain, there’s a description of it in Les Sœurs Vatard which haunts me. Finally, the falsified hosts and the nourishing enemas are, in a jokey but serious way, chiselled with the care of an artist, and among the most extraordinary things I’ve read.

Do you want me now to say frankly what troubled me about the book? First of all, I say again, the confusion. Perhaps it’s my builder’s temperament which balks at it, but it displeases me that des Esseintes is the same at the end as at the beginning, that there’s no progression whatsoever, that the chapters are always ushered in by a weary transition of the author, that in the end what you’re giving us is a magic lantern show, the slides chosen at random. Is it the neurosis of your hero that turns him to this exceptional life, or is it this exceptional life that causes his neurosis? There is a link is there not, but it’s not very clearly established. I believe that the novel would have been more striking, above all in its transcendental aspect, if you had constructed it more logically, however mad it is… .

In short, you have made me spend three very happy evenings. This book will be classed at least as a curiosity among your books; but be very proud you have done it.

If Huysmans felt

Reviews for Against Nature

[stef7sa-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I quit at 40%. Childish are the behaviour and philosophies of the protagonist who elaborates chapters long on Latin writers that are to his taste or not, flowers that he likes or not, etc. This novel of ideas is more a collection of essays than a narrative. Very boring!

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like Don Quixote this book possesses some magnificent chapters, and some that you just have to grimace through. There'll never be a better chapter than when Des Esseintes decides to journey to London, but doesn't actually make it.

[big_bang_gorilla · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This "novel" is actually a series of prose poems describing in minute detail the life of the mind of a fin-de-siecle decadent as viewed through the prism of his opinions about such matters as Latin literature and precious stones. As such, it hearkens back to the great decadent poets of the France of a generation earlier, and, to a lesser degree, the futurists who emerged a decade or so later. It is very difficult and unrewarding reading, despite the occasional impressive use of imagery, and few will care to plow through a book which requires four or five trips to the dictionary to complete reading one page.

[padmajoy-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the book from which "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" is based. Fascinating story of this type of surreal genre.

[neurodrew · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Jean Des Esseintes is a very rich man, the last of a noble family, who led a life of parties and mistresses in Paris, until he becomes disgusted by society, and moves to an isolated country house to enjoy his art treasures and books in quiet contemplation. He asserts that his tastes are highly discriminating, and he has rare books bound in rare leather, many paintings and drawings, often erotic, and goes through crazes for plants, then artificial plants, and even at one point a jeweled turtle. He has an elaborate dispenser of alcohlic spirits, that he can use to create just the right taste for his mood, and has an exhaustive collection of perfumes. In his isolation he begins to dream of previous affairs, becomes ill, and at the end is sent back to Paris by his doctor. The book is full of unusual words and detailed descriptins or musings about literature and Des Esseintes' collections.

[pivic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author himself thought this book would be a universal flop; au contraire, it wasn't. Instead, it has affected writers, poets, libertines and other people around the world, and continues to impress, outrage and mess with people's ideas on what a book should be like.

A man, Jean Des Esseintes, creates his own artistic creation through eccentric and bohemian ways. For example, he ponders the significance of colours and blends of those for ages, along with smells and sights.

The translation is wonderful, riddled with footnotes and illustrations that flesh out Esseintes' surroundings and references, and the book contains a splendid end note from the translator along with a list of names and explanations; without the annotations, I would not have graded this book as highly as I have. Apart from the namedroppings, this book is worth a lot.

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Painfully beautiful, weighty ruminations on art, Latin , horticulture, Catholic literature and liturgical music parade past desiring only to be left alone. These stitches aphorisms and taxonimies obscure a darker edge to the novel. It is left unsaid but there is something of menace afoot.

[toddsherman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Their imperfections pleased him, provided they were neither parasitic nor servile, and perhaps there was a grain of truth in his theory that the inferior and decadent writer, who is more subjective, though unfinished, distills a more irritating aperient and acid balm than the artist of the same period who is truly great. In his opinion, it was in their turbulent sketches that one perceived the exaltations of the most excitable sensibilities, the caprices of the most morbid psychological states, the most extravagant depravities of language charged, in spite of its rebelliousness, with the difficult task of containing the effervescent salts of sensations and ideas.”—Against Nature by Joris-Karl HuysmansAmen!À rebours. Against the grain. Against nature. No matter the translation or language it all comes out right. Decadence never seemed so austere; retreat never seemed so opulent. No wonder this had such an impact on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. I’d discovered an odd painter from that time during research for my own psychological horror story of a painter, “Cripplegate”, who first gained prominence within the dark, detailed and deluded pages of Huysmans’ classic. What could seemingly be mistaken for a catalogue of grotesquery or litany of extravagance by those without imagination is really an exploration of a wasted human soul sealing himself within a self-made ivory tower and failing desperately at rebuilding some kind of kinship with humanity.Odilon Redon! That inimitable painter of surrealistic nightmares, hanging in that eccentric’s house, a unique voice within a unique voice of its era. Was Huysmans just being reactionary? Or was he dreadfully bored? Maybe he had a hyperthymic temperament like me. He’d taken as much as he could from his world, or at least his antihero had, immersed himself in oddities, wallpapered his existence with the outré and offensive, only to be broken by the expectation of it all. Alas, des Esseintes.So now what? Back to society? Back to another book? Back to another project to fool the brain into believing that this current existence is the one you were always meant for because it was the only one in which you could fashion it yourself? Except this book was written in 1884, sounds a hundred years older, and feels as modern as middle-aged angst aswim in seas technologically deeper than one can plumb with rusty anchor and busted chain.Hellfire Club! Sir Francis Dashwood bashing his head against the gothic walls of Strawberry Hill. Great splintered Horace Walpole! The first gothic novel. A break against tradition. Cutting against the grain. Embracing tradition, history, and throwing it aside to paint or write or forge something singular from within and have it trampled in the grass and full mocking glare of the sun. Pearls before swine. Maybe some things are better kept hidden. Locked in a treasure room and toasted over and over into dissipation. I have cried out to you! De Profundis. It’s only fitting it took one-hundred and thirty Psalms to hear that wail from the depths and make castle walls ring.Did any of these fucks feel any kind of affinity for their time? ‘Cause I sure as hell don’t. I’m just grateful that Huysmans had the guts to take a chance and lay it all out, vomit in the short grass, for the few of us who’ve been there to nod before turning politely away.

[veilofisis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

'If rape and arson, poison and the knifehave not yet stitched their ludicrous designsonto the banal buckram of our fatesit is because our souls lack enterprise!But here among the scorpions and the hounds,the jackals, apes and vultures, snakes and wolves,monsters that howl and growl and squeal and crawl,in all the squalid zoo of vies, oneis even uglier and fouler than the rest,although the least flamboyant of the lot;this beast would gladly undermine the earthand swallow all creation in a yawn;I speak of Boredom which with ready tearsdreams of hangings as it puffs its pipe.Reader, you know this squeamish monster well,- hypocrite reader, - my alias, - my twin!’ --BaudelaireJoris-Karl Huysmans—sybarite, mystic, rake, oblate, and (of all things) civil servant—published what has been referred to as ‘the bible of the Decadence,’ À Rebours (often translated under the title of ‘Against Nature’ or ‘Against the Grain’), in 1884, setting in motion a literary movement that would come to include such icons as Mirbeau, Wilde, Rachilde, De Sa-Carneiro, and Beardsley. There had been earlier precursors who wore the mantle of ‘Decadent,’ sometimes with pride: Baudelaire, Poe, Gautier, Hugo; but it was Huysmans, with his callous disregard for convention, who established the motifs we refer to as ‘Decadent’ today. À Rebours has been viewed as more a catalog of tastes than a novel, considering that it is entirely devoid of a plot in any real understanding of the word; but the psychology of its central character, Des Esseintes, is a constant source of illumination, and remains as instrumental to defining the trappings of Decadence as the flamboyant catalog of literature, interior decoration, perfume, painting, and aesthetic experience that comprises the bulk of its pages. Des Esseintes, a libertine, grown weary with the sordid pleasures of fin de siècle Paris, retreats into solitude; purchasing a house, and filling it with countless objects that reflect an ornate, languid, and near-hallucinatory preoccupation with aesthetic excess, Des Esseintes begins a personal quest to seek out higher and higher avenues of experience, cloistered away in effete seclusion from the insipid trivialities and tedious ennui of modern life. Here, in reclusion, he is free to experiment with lavish predilections and whimsical pursuits not afforded by his previous circumstances: from fatally bejeweling a tortoise to surveying the degenerate concerns of authors and artists as varied as Petronius, Verlaine, Apuleius, Baudelaire, and Gustave Moreau; in a typical episode of À Rebours, Des Esseintes, who had before found more beauty in the patent artificiality of paper flowers than in their natural counterparts, decides that the ultimate in sensation would involve procuring natural flora that possess the curious and almost ridiculous distinction of appearing more false than their artificial analogues. This preoccupation with the supremacy of artificiality is, perhaps, the chief concern of À Rebours, illustrated with particular élan when Des Esseintes, who desires to travel to London as respite from the regularity of his life in seclusion, chances to dine, before embarking, at an English restaurant located in his abhorred Paris: after his meal, Des Esseintes promptly cancels his trip to England, returning to his country estate, having satisfied his desire to experience England by enjoying the artificial, Parisian notion of ‘England’ presented to him over dinner. On one hand, Des Esseintes is sure that he will be underwhelmed by the ‘real thing,’ as the beauty of a lover devoid of cosmetics cannot approach the painted opulence of an affected image; more subversively, however, our world-weary libertine is aware that the experience he seeks is of a uniquely ersatz variety, and that subjecting his ‘heightened tastes’ to the dismal, pedestrian pleasures of European society would dull, and perhaps corrupt, his delicate sensibilities. This rationalization is archetypal, in that it examines one of the key paradoxes of the Decadent world-view (a world-view which, it should be noted, revels in the charms of a good paradox): that, while the Decadent soul may seek redemption from his patent artificiality and adulterated perversions, he remains well-aware that the ‘purity’ of these notions of contrition is threatened chiefly by his own surfeit of experience: for how can gauche, prosaic 'reality' ever compare to the sumptuous unreality created by the Decadent imagination? And how can confessing the sins of the Decadent soul be a worthy pursuit when these sins, in and of themselves, illustrate the absurdity of both ‘confession’ and ‘sin?' Far more intriguing to the Decadent would be the affected comforts of a life of religious rigor, entirely devoid of the moral reflections that generally accompany it: the architecture of the church, to the Decadent, is far more paramount than the goings-on inside of it; the ephemeral, sensual allure of the incense and wine and costume and resonance of the organ can never be matched by the rituals for which they have been appropriated. Barbey d'Aurevilly may have been considering this puzzle when he famously portended a choice for the author of À Rebours between ‘the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the Cross.’ Huysmans, intriguingly, chose the latter, applying to the rigorous philosophy of Catholic mysticism the same impassioned dedication his creation, Des Esseintes, applied to his own pursuit of aesthetic experience. Which is to say that Huysmans—author of the ‘bible’ of the Decadence, À Rebours—himself epitomizes the ultimate paradox of the Decadent imagination.

[xuebi-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

But I just don't enjoy the pleasures other people enjoy!

With this exclamation, Jean des Esseintes, the sole character in Huysmans' Against Nature, sums up the central theme of the novel.

Against Nature is an atypical novel: there is only one character - the decadent and ailing aristocrat des Esseintes - and there is no traditional plot to speak of, rather the novel catalogues and discusses the varied tastes des Esseintes has in literature, art, music, perfume, and flowers to name a few. Des Esseintes prides himself on having tastes far removed from the common, vulgar crowd of everyday society, from whom he has secluded himself in an eremitic existence in a country manor to be left in solitude with his possessions and sensual experiences. Veering between extreme and nervous excitability to debilitating ennui, des Esseintes represents the ultimate in decadent fin de siècle aesthetics.

Huysmans' prose is replete with obscure and idiosyncratic vocabulary and detailed narrative descriptions, all of which have ably and faithfully translated into English by Robert Baldick. Huysmans also displays an encyclopaedic knowledge of many subjects including perfumery, classical Latin authors, and tropical plants.

Against Nature indeed goes against the grain of traditional plot-driven novels, focusing rather on the psychology and tastes of the central character, decadently languishing in luxurious tastes and emotions. It is a deeply interesting psychological study of one man and his retreat from society, and the effect it has on him. It remains a classic Symbolist and Decadent piece of literature, and as the author himself said, it has exploded onto the literary scene "like a meteorite" and remains powerful even now.

[poquette_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Against Nature (A rebours in the French original, also sometimes translated as Against the Grain) concerns itself with a degenerate French aristocrat, Jean des Esseintes, the last of his line, who has sunk so deep into the mire of degradation and decadence that he is bored and disgusted with his life, to the extent that he sells the family chateau in order to create a stream of income and retreats to the suburbs, renouncing the debased life he has lived and all acquaintances, becoming in almost every way a luxuriating hermit, nevertheless taking care to employ servants who can shield him as inconspicuously as possible from the quotidian necessities of living. Des Esseintes' debauchery has left him debilitated and has turned him into a narcissistic and neurotic, if highly intelligent, hypochondriac who seems to enjoy ill health. Where his physical ailments end and his neuroses begin is unclear. He decorates his house according to his own unique aesthetic and surrounds himself with books and art which reflect that artistic sense which is revealed as the book progresses.A rebours is "against nature" in the sense that des Esseintes has concluded that man has outdone nature at her own game, so he contrives to surround himself with artifice. It is also "against the grain" in the sense that almost everything des Esseintes does and nearly all the opinions he expresses are the antithesis of popular taste. The very form the book takes is in counterpoint to the Naturalism that dominated contemporary French literature. At the time the book was published in 1884, it created a tremendous stir among the "Naturalists," Émile Zola in particular, as they believed Huysmans had struck the death knell of that brand of realism. However, A rebours is a one-of-a kind work, one upon which a school of literature could not realistically be fashioned. While it is a breathtaking read, one cannot seriously imagine wanting to read another like it. It is challenge enough to get through the original, not because it isn't entertaining, but the level of erudition, the vast vocabulary, the plethora of obscure literary references going back to Classical Latin, the catalogues of paintings, the lists of flora, of perfumes, of gemstones, not to mention the never-ending description, all go on and on leaving the reader gasping for a breath of fresh air. Consequently, it is not an easy book to read in either English or the French original. Copious notes and a good introduction are the order of the day. Thankfully, the Oxford World Classics edition provides both.Despite its being one of a kind, A rebours heralds the birth of the modern and post-modern novel. It is without a plot and treats of but one character, but the reader has the sense that a story is being told, although the story merely follows the timeline of des Esseintes' life. Some chapters cause one to ask: "Is this a novel or a scholarly treatise?" Others have an episodic quality. Regardless, the novel elevates description to new heights, as it is devoid of dialogue.As a literary artifact of the late nineteenth century, A rebours is tremendously interesting. There is much to be learned here, and readers interested in the history and development of literary types will probably find it fascinating. However, I do not think it will appeal to everyone. Just the same, I am very glad I read it.

[roblong_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An odd one, a 'scandalous' book of its time that recounts the life of Jean Des Esseintes, who hates the 19th century French society he lives in and shuts himself away from it, indulging in various sorts of decadence - going through obsessions with flowers, jewellery, perfumes, classical literature etc. The book has no plot beyond his going into seclusion and its eventual end, but generally just catalogues his tastes in all those things in some detail. If that sounds rather boring, it is. The most interesting chapter is a memory from a previous time, and his attempts to make a passing young man into a murderer.That said, it was worth reading the book to have it to think about afterwards. The point of view it describes might not make for compelling reading but is certainly stark - reading the intro and appendices to the book, describing reaction to the book and how the author saw it afterwards was more interesting than the book itself. Huysmans saw the book as the start of his later conversion to Catholicism, which seems about right - Des Esseintes has contempt for the world and all things human but does not have the hope of anything better elsewhere. That is a tricky position to hold, intellectually and emotionally, and the reviewer who told him he needed either to shoot himself or convert had a point.

[widsith_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An ornate, sickly, claustropobic book, full of fascinating discussions about art and literature, and studded with items of outré vocabulary (I still haven’t worked out what mœchialogie means). It is a novel for people who like talking about novels – the plot itself is slim and of little importance. I’ll summarise it quickly: des Esseintes, a rich, effete aristocrat, retires from a life of excess and debauchery to live in his retreat at Fontenay outside Paris, where he shuts himself off from the rest of the world and ekes out an existence in a cloying, hypochondriac, lamplit environment that has been elaborately constructed to meet his own aesthetic requirements.Basically, he’s a proto-hipster, who has had enough of dealing with Other People and wants to lock himself away from public opinion. Anything that's popular with anyone else is out – Goya gets taken down from his walls for being not obscure enough.Cette promiscuité dans l’admiration était d’ailleurs l’un des plus grands chagrins de sa vie ; d’incompréhensibles succès lui avaient à jamais gâté des tableaux et des livres jadis chers ; devant l’approbation des suffrages, il finissait par leur découvrir d’imperceptibles tares, et il les rejetait….[This promiscuity of admiration was one of the most distressing things in his life. Incomprehensible successes had permanently ruined books and paintings for him which he had previously held dear; faced with widespread public approbation, he ended up discovering imperceptible flaws in works, and rejecting them….]Although he has given up interpersonal relationships himself (even his servants have to wear felt slippers, so he doesn’t hear them walking around), he often reminisces about his previous conquests. I particularly loved the early description of his old bachelor pad, decorated in pink and lined with mirrors, which had beencélèbre parmi les filles qui se complaisaient à tremper leur nudité dans ce bain d’incarnat tiède qu’aromatisait l’odeur de menthe dégagée par le bois des meubles.[famous among the girls who had been pleased to soak their nudity in this bath of warm carnation infused by the smell of mint given off by the furniture.]His view of women in general is distinctly un-modern, but often weirdly fascinating. I liked the strange little anecdote of his liaison with a US circus performer, which read like an Angela Carter short story. (Unfortunately, in a complaint soon to become a cliché among European male writers, his American girlfriend turned out to have une retenue puritaine au lit). Des Esseintes moves on to date a ventriloquist, whom he makes lie out of sight and enact odd, symbolist dialogues between statues of a chimera and a sphinx that he bought for the occasion.There are even some aesthete-esque hints towards des Esseintes’s homosexual urges, with vague references to a young man who made him think about ‘sinning against the sixth and ninth of the Ten Commandments’.Other senses, too, get close examination. An entire chapter is given over to various exotic scents and perfumes which des Esseintes is trying to create. When it comes to taste, our hero has what he calls a ‘mouth organ’, which consists of several dozen barrels of alcoholic liqueurs ranged side by side, which he mixes-and-matches to create a variety of gustatory symphonies or harmonies to suit his current mood.The language all this is described in is deliberately rich and unnaturalistic. Huysmans’s basic approach is outlined when des Esseintes explains the kind of writing he admires among Latin authors – full ofverbes aux sucs épurés, de substantifs sentant l’encens, d’adjectifs bizarres, taillés grossièrement dans l’or, avec le goût barbare et charmant des bijoux goths….[the purified juice of verbs, nouns that smell of incence, bizarre adjectives scultped roughly from gold, with the barbaric, charming taste of Gothic jewels….]I came to Huysmans via Barbey d’Aurevilly, and it was nice to see that des Esseintes thinks so highly of Les Diaboliques that he had a special copy made, printed sacrilegiously on ecclesiastical parchment. Barbey reviewed À Rebours when it came out, and made a surprisingly perceptive comment that its author, like Baudelaire, would have to choose between la bouche d’un pistolet ou les pieds de la croix ‘the mouth of a pistol or the foot of the Cross’. What is it about these Decadent authors – Baudelaire, Huysmans, Barbey himself – that despite their obvious dislike of religion, they all ended up going back to the Catholic faith? Suffice to say that this novel draws its power to shock and delight from its willingness specifically to go against (à rebours) the ideals and principles of a Catholic culture – not that that prevents a more secular modern reader from being shocked and delighted in his or her own right.And they should be, it’s worth it. This book can be oppressive, but it’s a wonderful experience.

[lukeasrodgers_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lacking any real plot, this book is somewhere between a character study, a manual on how to achieve the pinnacle of decadence, a sermon on the merits and demerits of various artists, writers, and holymen, and a screed on the follies of modern life. I've never read anything like it, and while it was fascinating and largely enjoyable, I don't particularly wish to read anything like it again in the near future.

[startingover_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story of a man apart; a gorgeous, sickly anti-hero hermetically sealed from the common herd by an uncommon intellect. There is no plot as such, the book is a catalogue of things worth caring about (?): literature, art, beautiful things, jewels, perfumes. But where are all the people? Where is love? It's all very rarefied: Latin poets, Salom?, the black dinner, jewelled tortoises: all thrown into this golden baroque stew. Peter Greenaway could make a brilliant film from this. [Aug 1991][Jan 1997]

[ari4joki · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a sumptuously sensual book. Not much action, but the descriptions of the various aesthetic experiences are compelling, and the atmosphere of the fin-de-siecle ennui of the decadent aristocrat is tangible. Among many artists and writers that Huysmans mentions, Edgar Allan Poe comes up a number of times, and some of the scenery is reminiscent of some of Poe's Domains. An odd book, a rich banquet, a meditation on qualia. I am not quite sure what makes this a milestone of the Symbolist movement in literature, however.

[thecriticaltimes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In English the title was translated as either 'Against Nature' or 'Against the Grain', which to me are two very different titles. It occurred to me that this tension within the meaning of the title itself is a good indication of the contents of the novel. We are introduced to a French aristocrat by the name of Des Esseintes who is of feeble stamina and who might be called a dandy in British terms. We follow the young man as he slowly retreats out of everyday life into a decadent seclusion of his own design. At times opulent in its descriptions of Des Esseintes' mansion, at times excruciatingly detailed and accurate in Des Esseintes' analysis of his tastes, desires and repulsions, the novel lures the reader into an artificial world of what seems to be luxury. Page after page Des Esseintes delves deeper into his own mind. He collects rare specimens of everything and if there does not exist a rarity he believes he should have, he has it created from his own detailed drawings and directions. As a side note, most of the objects and interiors the young man envisions were based on actual examples of dandyish extravaganza.The reader is slowly included into the artificial world of Des Esseintes and slowly the alternative reality appears more and more sold. Instead the young man's health deteriorates and his mind attempts to grapple with his own choices. Inevitably he wavers between stepping back into Beau Monde or forever lock himself away into an imaginary world. He goes back and forth and makes several attempts to take either extreme leaps. In one famous scene Des Esseintes is well on his way to visit London when after thinking over the plan in his mind he decides that in his mind he has already read and imagined so much of Britain's capital that he can only be disappointed by traveling there. Instead he returns to his mansion. Ultimately his private physician offers him the choice: go back into the world and regain your physical health, or retreat into your own mind and suffer.The author, Joris-Karl Huysmans, wrote the novel in a time when literature's standard was realism devoid of symbolism or misplaced fantasy. Huysmans received both high acclaim from writers such as Oscar Wilde, but also derision from esteemed authors like Zola, who was Huysmans' mentor and inspiration. Perhaps this book can be seen as the ultimate anti-novel in the sense that it does not feature any trappings of a book designed to entertain. If you want to convey a point or principle then you either write it with great entertainment value but your meaningful message might not be remembered, or you write the work in a serious tone, in which case it will be remembered but not widely read. Huysmans took the extreme side of those polar opposites and goes beyond somber writing and confronts the reader head on by presenting the world of Des Esseintes from a solipsistic standpoint in which as a reader you have no other safety net than your own experiences and opinions. Instead of taking the Disney approach of embedding a clear takeaway moral message, the novel's aim is to have the reader make decisions on how to travel through life and in that sense it is the paragon of letting the reader take away whatever usefulness can be derived, even if this means rejecting the novel.

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had expected Huymans' A Rebours to be something similar to Lautremont's Maldoror, but this book is a different beast altogether. As did Maldoror, A Rebours eschews the notion of the traditional novel, though not in like manner. It is more a study of aesthetics, a critical text using the novel framework, defined by its tone rather than any sort of plot. The premise is visible right on the surface, being that the inventions of artifice from the minds of men are superior to the creations of the natural world. The themes of indulgence and excess here are of the same mold found in writings by other Symbolists such as Baudelaire, whose poems are praised by Huysmans' protagonist. The way in which they are presented here, however, will not be easy to digest for most.

[wubsy_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked out this book in the bookstore because of it's intriguing cover. Something about the expression of the man's face seemed lost and almost crazed. The novel did not disappoint me, and in Des Esseintes, Huysman's created a character who remains agonizingly out of reach. The descriptions throughout are magnificent, (a sort of exciting Dickens), and I found the protagonist at all times lovable and nauseating. The novel is beautifully crafted, but simultaneously seems to be teetering on the edge of total collapse and disintegration. That it doesn't is all part of its peculiar charm.

[perfectleft_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

wow. a journey within a confined space. effete tastes refined beyond any pallet... a nutshell of infinite space. but allergic to nuts.

[jkorta_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am a great fan of Huysmans, esoteric, mystic and hysteric that he was. In the closing years of the 19th century, fin-de-siecle literature was desperately trying to break free of naturalist modes, championed by its giant and erstwhile tutor of the young Huysmans, Emile Zola. Not possessing the virile protestant work ethic of his mentor, Huysmans wrote in starts and fits, "hysterically" one might say, and after dabbling in naturalism began pining for something more obscure, and more blatantly mystic and manichean. This is his opening salvo, and the decadent movement's overture against naturalism, an unapologetic rejection of the "real" world to turn, reclusively, towards the artificial and the arcane. Truly bizarre, this book is full of wonderful allusions to obscure artworks of all kinds and, not unintentionally in my opinion, will leave you dizzy if not nauseated by its irrepressible lists, cataloging the obsessional tastes of its immortal hero and dandy, des Esseintes.

[thebooknerd · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Though dry and dragging, this is an interesting book to be at least familiar with. It is a quintessential depiction of the fin de siecle and the degenerate mode of literature.

[experimentalis_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

grows better with age

[williamcostiganjr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A dandy retreats from society to ensconce himself in his lair of books, perfumes, flowers, art, etc. An amusing and entertaining read. You can skim any parts you find dull, but Huysmans is a skilled enough writer that reading the protagonist's opinions about obscure Latin authors somehow became enjoyable.In some ways a forerunner to American Psycho.

[overtheseatoskye_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was really enjoying this book - the protagonist's fussy, over-educated langour, his decadent dismissals of classical literature, the sumptuous textures of the setting - until the bit about the jeweled turtle. And I thought I was unshockable!

[achelate · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A total roll through the senses. At times the book was hilarious, sensual and fascinating.

[alexthehunn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At the end of the nineteenth century a young, decadent aristocrat indulges himself in multiple forms of depravity. Reading this made me feel like what I imagine opium dreams must be like.