Against Nature: A New Translation of 'a Rebours' (Penguin Classics)

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Huysmans's novel, Against the Grain, has more discussions of sound, smell and taste than any other work of literature we know of. There really isn’t any dialogue or other characters, nor is there any plot or storyline in the ordinary sense of the term, rather, the novel describes the details of Des Esseintes’s life as a monk of the sensual. The protagonist of Submission (2015), a novel by Michel Houellebecq, is a literary scholar specializing in Huysmans and his work; Huysmans's relation to Catholicism serves as a foil for the book's treatment of Islam in France.

If I did read it, I was completely wrong in my evaluation of this as a static, effete precursor to Dorian Gray, a work marooned in the vanished aesthetic of the late nineteenth century.I don’t know intentionally or not but Against Nature is an absolute opposite of Walden by Henry David Thoreau and it is a complete denial of nature. This is a remarkably smart copy, notably uncommon in such good condition and in the rare dust jacket. It is the misanthropy of the problem child who does things he knows he mustn't do--not because he enjoys them, but out of a desire to betray the image of authority he has created in his mind. Les Églises de Paris Archived 2006-12-06 at the Wayback Machine, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions de Paris, 2005.

Against Nature, in the words of the author, exploded 'like a meteorite' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day. Each week REID’S READER offers Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful to readers and browsers. Inevitably he wavers between stepping back into Beau Monde or forever lock himself away into an imaginary world. That’s always been the problem, though, way back to the Dadaists: if you are obsessed with rejecting mainstream culture, that means you have to follow mainstream culture closely enough to know what it is doing, so you can then reject it. In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of " Decadent" literature, [1] inspiring works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).He discussed the iconography of Christian architecture at length in La cathédrale (1898), set at Chartres and with its cathedral as the focus of the book.

Includes Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's review of À rebours from Le Constitutionnel, 28 July 1884, in appendix.His aesthetics are a replacement for faith, which explains why his house is filled with religious iconography repurposed into furnishings for his museum to himself--and yet, not himself, for throughout the text, though he spends his fortune to pursue every idea which seems to him easing at the time, none of it satisfies him--indeed, it drives him mad, makes him sick, destroys him. At other times he will think on qualities of pieces that at his point in time had not yet been composed, accrediting his thoughts that those who concern themselves with certain ideals will not find themselves content with the current age. He decides to collect exotic flowers, which resemble diseased organs, alien entities, and strange sculpture. non poteva dirgli quando sarebbe stato di ritorno, se tra un anno, un mese, una settimana o anche prima. After his retirement from the Ministry in 1898, made possible by the commercial success of his novel, La cathédrale, Huysmans planned to leave Paris and move to Ligugé.

Demek ki elimizde Dekadan bir karakter var, soylu kan bozulmuş buna toplumsal çürüme, yozlaşma da dahil olmuştur. My words above are relatively plain, not even close to the style of Huysmans’s ornate, exaggerated language. The novels are also noteworthy for their encyclopedic documentation, ranging from the catalogue of decadent Latin authors in À rebours to the discussion of the symbiology of Christian architecture in La cathédrale. It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own .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. However it is important to recognise Huysmans's debt to Baudelaire, as many of the themes and motifs of his book - the egotism, perversity, artificial sensations, finding beauty in 'le mal', the sense of ennui and fatigue - were formulated by Baudelaire in Les fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris.