Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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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? Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray , Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (A Rebours) is translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness in Penguin Classics.

Des Esseintes conjures up pretend worlds for himself too, with the aid of perfumes which he mixes together to make powerfully suggestive scents. Sliding vertiginously between the beautiful and divine, Against Nature is a brilliant defense of artifice and cultural alchemy. Mundane Made Awesome: Des Esseintes' "hobbies" (the word seems inadequate) are described by Huysmans in lavish style and as if they are of epic importance, which to the central character, they are. Abstract: With the manuscript of A rebours, we witness the birth of a text that marked literary history: work in embryonic form, but already a work in its own right.Many critics were appalled by its apparent lack of morality, while young Dandies and Aesthetes were attracted to it for its idolisation of art and sensation. We get a comprehensive survey of numerous areas and disciplines to which that character dedicates himself, from exotic flora and parfumerie to a critical survey of the annals of ancient Roman history to the religious apologia of the Middle Ages, and again of some fairly modern contemporaneous poets, authors and artists of Huysmans’ era and preference.

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. 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. 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.

He fills his rooms with perfumes and almost suffocates his stupid self, fainting across his window sill and falling ill. Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (A Rebours) is translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness in Penguin Classics. Aristocrats Are Evil: The novel begins with a description of portraits of some of des Esseintes' ancestors, one of whom inhabited a Decadent Court and sounds very much like this. 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.