Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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in a period devoted to money-making, lived apart…sheltered from the stupidity surrounding him…taking pleasure, far from society, in the revelations of the mind, in the visions of the brain, refining…concepts…in lightly hinted inferences linked by a berely perceptible thread. Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmans's À rebours. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. He is an insufferable elitist snob, hating everyone in the world and all they do, despising the majority of art and literature and liking only a very few painters and authors.

Then he had kept mistresses already famed for their depravity, and helped to swell the funds of those agencies which supply dubious pleasures for a consideration.The basic premise is that Des Esseintes, the novel’s anti-hero, has become so disillusioned with modern society and the pettiness of those around him that he decides to hole himself up in a rural French mansion, cut off from everyone, and dedicate himself to the pursuit of sensation. Une seule passion, la femme, eût pu le retenir dans cet universel dédain qui le poignait, mais celle-là était, elle aussi, usée. I’ve experienced and seen all I wanted to…I’ve been saturated with English life since my departure…what aberration was I suffering from…to believe, like some complete fool, in the necessity, interest and benefit of a real excursion? The Yellow Scale," which depicts an amazingly burnt out aesthetic type, wrapped up in a yellow robe, yellow book (of course) in one hand, and cigarette burning out in his other limp, yellow hand.

For example, his two servants (of course he has servants) live and work on a separate floor of the house to him and he usually communicates with them by ringing bells.I picked this book up again last night, a favorite from grad school, a germinal novel of French decadence. Given its reputation as a novel about nothing, with no real progression or notable events, one of those surprises relates to how utterly mistaken that notion actually is. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him . 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. While it is true that it may have been primarily if not singlehandedly responsible for Wilde’s shift from wry if essentially populist entertainments like The Importance of Being Earnest to more ‘sordid’ aesthetic efforts such as Salome and Dorian Gray (whose lead character refers to an influential “poisonous little book” during the course of the proceedings, which was in fact A Rebours), it is also true that such literary precedents as Barbey D’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques (and his adoption and advertisement of Dandyism per se), closely related Romantic writings from the likes of Theophile Gautier (who was one of the first to adopt the derisive term of “decadent” as a badge of honor and stylistic descriptor of his own efforts) and works even Des Esseintes notes as influential such as Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and translations of Poe, the poetry of Verlaine and Stephane Mallarme, and artists like Gustave Moreau and Felicien Rops were already producing works in this vein.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Phil asked if I could do a review of one of them, so here it is, my review of Against Nature (A Rebours) by Joris-Karl Huysman. He lines a tortoise with gold so it will go with his carpet, but when that doesn’t work he encrusts it with obscure gems (diamonds and pearls are just too vulgar).Illustrating his preference for artifice over nature (a characteristic Decadent theme), Des Esseintes chooses real flowers that apparently imitate artificial ones. I have this idea that people are translating old texts better now than they used to; for one, translation studies is growing in academia, and for two, translators are less interested in “smoothing over” some roughnesses or X-ratednesses to attract “sensitive” readers. Des Esseintes conjures up pretend worlds for himself too, with the aid of perfumes which he mixes together to make powerfully suggestive scents.

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. The only two I've come across so far are the Robert Baldick (Penguin) and the Margaret Mauldon (Oxford) translations. A single passion, woman, might have restrained him in the universal contempt that gripped him, but she, too, had palled.In a letter of November 1882, Huysmans told Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy". In one of the more amusing passages, Des Esseintes, after reading the novels of Dickens, decides to take a trip to England. From what I’ve read of his letters, he seemed to be constantly dissatisfied with how people perceived him and his work.