Joris-Karl Huysmans

The hero of this curious novel is des Esseintes, a neurasthenic aristocrat who has turned his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreated to an isolated country villa. Here, accompanied only by a couple of silent servants, he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems, and complex perfumes and embarks on a series of increasingly strange aesthetic experiments, starting with the decision to give his giant pet tortoise a jewel-encrusted shell...

Against Nature

eileen sheats

Perfect covid-19 quarantine read. Any tradcath saint of the senses will love this.

Unique ideas, happy to have this one in me, but my god is it hard to read. 

Adam Scharf

Against Nature is Huysmans's great fin-de-siècle novel anticipating many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarmé and Poe. This new translation is supplemented by a critically up-to-date introduction and indispensable notes which enhance the understanding of a highly allusive work.

Emmett

This tiny door of a book concealing so much beauty, prose so delightfully purple, abstruse and effusive that when the description reaches an impossible pinnacle one is gripped by the impulse to bury one's face in the open pages, vaguely expecting it to be soaked with the perfume of crushed florals. One imagines that a special foliosociety edition, if it were ever to be made, would have that, and more, finely ornamented inside and out like one of the frail, refined, misanthropic aristocrat's books. It seems right that Against Nature was the inspiration for the book that corrupted Dorian Gray; when the former is infinitely more stylised and more erudite. Des Esseintes is a true (and perhaps therefore jaded) connoisseur of sensation, in comparison Dorian Gray barely divined the value of his precious possessions. It is a matter of some amusement to find the very things that wear on his patience still doggedly present in this world.

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Isabella Agostino

Against Nature

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