J Huysmans

L�-Bas, translated as Down There or The Damned, is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in 1891. It is Huysmans' most famous work after � rebours. L�-Bas deals with the subject of Satanism in contemporary France, and the novel stirred a certain amount of controversy on its first appearance. It is the first of Huysmans' books to feature the character Durtal, a thinly disguised portrait of the author himself, who would go on to be the protagonist of all of Huysmans' subsequent novels: En route, La cath�drale and L'oblat.

La BAS by J. -K. Huysmans

À rebours (translated into English as Against Nature or Against the Grain) (1884) is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. À rebours contains many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature.

Against the Grain

At the novel's center is Durtal, a writer obsessed with the life of one of the blackest figures in history, Gilles de Rais -- child murderer, sadist, necrophile, and practitioner of all the black arts. The book's authentic, extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the Black Mass have never been surpassed.

J Huysmans

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