Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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What, in fact, were all the evangelical pharmacopoeias compared with his treatises on spiritual hygiene? It’s like an episode of Seinfeld featuring no one but Kramer reminiscing about past mischiefs and schemes. Perhaps true peace can only be found after knowing so much, yet understanding so little and finally being able to ask the right questions. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siècle imagination. It is largely plotless, and largely chronicles his aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, religion, paintings, and hyperaesthetic sensory experiences.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. And if that doesn’t sound suspiciously like the world of 2013, then you’re just not paying attention.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. the universal admiration (Goya’s) works had won had…put him off slightly, and he had refrained from framing them for some years, for fear that by putting them on show, the first idiot who caught sight of them would deem it necessary to relieve himself of his banal opinions and to go into raptures in front of them, in a completely conventional fashion. It essentially aspired to separate literature and art from the materialistic preoccupations of industrialized society, and morals being of secondary concern, if at all, led to the depiction of such depravities, and A Rebours was one of those books. It's the feature of his style he tends to be most remembered for in French literature, and given that there's a lot of description of lavish furnishings, art works, antique objects and so on, he gets plenty of opportunity to use it.

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". At the very moment that Wilde was falling in with social patterns, he was confronted with a book which even in its title defied them. Among French authors, he shows nothing but contempt for the Romantics but adores the poetry of Baudelaire. Significativa la scelta dell immagine in copertina: «Salomé» di Moreau è uno dei quadri sulla cui descrizione Huysmans si sofferma più a lungo nel sesto capitolo dell opera.Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmans's À rebours. It scarcely admitted—in theory at least—any exceptions to the rule; thus it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind. He decides to collect exotic flowers, which resemble diseased organs, alien entities, and strange sculpture. This seam of extremism played itself out via the Symbolist movement and it (arguably) reached its peak in the poetry of Maeterlinck and in the art of (among others) Arnold Bocklin and Ferdinand Hodler. While McGuinness's intro makes a good case for "Against the Grain" as a better title, beware of the Dover edtion under that name: it's old and expurgated, as is the illustrated one from the '30s).