Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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Europeans Are Kinky: Apart from some major-league womanising in his younger days, which ultimately bored him and turned him towards an aesthetic lifestyle, des Esseintes at one point seduces a female circus acrobat and also a woman who turns him on by using her skills as a professional ventriloquist to pretend that her husband is about to break in on them. Like des Esseintes, the author had apparently “suffered a bout of neuralgia” and chose to convalesce there, “re-reading Baudelaire and planting ‘almost artificial flowers’ in a garden in which ‘nothing has the air of being real”. 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.

I knew what to expect going in, and was only pleasantly surprised at just how enjoyable an experience it proved to be. Against Nature displays a profound disgust for women as well as an effete sensibility that rejected `normality' and convention.Huysmans’ great A Rebour (perhaps better translated Against the Grain), is a mordantly brilliant plunge into the depths of modern decadence. 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.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.A rebours was indeed part of a 'poisonous' Decadent French literature, and was identified by Arthur Symons as 'the breviary of the Decadence'. He dines at an English restaurant in Paris while waiting for his train and is delighted by the resemblance of the people to his notions derived from literature. After the whole was arranged and finished, all these several tints fell into accord at night and did not clash at all; the blue of the woodwork struck a stable note that was pleasing and satisfying to the eye, supported and warmed, so to say, by the surrounding shades of orange, which for their part shone out with a pure, unsullied gorgeousness, itself backed up and in a way heightened by the near presence of the blue. It was the heyday of Naturalism, but this school, which should have rendered the inestimable service of giving us real characters in precisely described settings, had ended up harping on the same old themes and was treading water.

As well as engendering a supra-human ideal in his soul…religion had also stirred up the illegitimate ideal of sensual pleasure. Instead what we get is a pervasive portrait of the psychology of a man, indeed the thinly disguised author of the narrative itself.he left them and drew closer to men of letters, with whom his mind should have had more affinity and felt better at ease.

Wilde is quoted as having said to an interviewer with the Pall Mall Gazette in 1892, "My idea of writing the play was simply this: I have one instrument that I know I can command, and that is the English language. Go Mad from the Isolation: Whilst he's not all worried about this happening, des Esseintes' doctor clearly is. And if that doesn’t sound suspiciously like the world of 2013, then you’re just not paying attention.By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. It is widely believed that À rebours is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Is it any good, this story about a man pottering about his house, living in his head, his imagination feeding off itself, slowly going mad? The leading figures of the movement included the two French men, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin, but Symbolism was not limited to France with other practitioners including the Norwegian Edvard Munch, the Austrian Gustav Klimt and the British Aubrey Beardsley.