Name: Against Nature
Rating: 4.027777777777778 (18 reviews)
ISBN: 9781522785392

Joris Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans was a famous French writer known for his large vocabulary and wit. Huysmans most famous novel was "Against Nature."

Against Nature

Joris K. Huysmans

Duc Jean des Esseintes, the wealthy last survivor of a once-powerful family, has retreated from his bourgeois life in Paris. Overwhelmed by the absurdities and grotesqueries of human affairs, he dwells in an isolated villa, spending his days in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. In an environment of ascetic medievalism and hermit-like seclusion, des Esseintes reviews the compendium of human experience. Color, food and drink, literature, art, music, philosophy, and religion—all are scrutinized, sifted, and analyzed according to his delicate, highly selective tastes. Filled with weird images, manifestations of a bizarre imagination, and biting wit, this novel scandalized Victorian critics with its break from naturalism and embrace of fin-de-siècle decadence. It nevertheless exerted considerable influence over French and English writers and remains a classic account of the quest for enlarged experience and new sensations. This edition includes a Preface written by the author 20 years after the book's original 1884 publication.

This has been on my to-read list for a long time, I even forgot why. Very special book, very mimicore. Insufferable in so many ways and therefore perfect. Rarely one that has character, a temperament. Demanding for my dead brain. Parts on colors struck me deep. Loneliness is less.

martian1138

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...

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

Adam Scharf

Arman Keyvanskhou

Isabella Agostino

Karolina Klermon-Williams

Seth Kalback

Pedro Assis Cadavez

Martin

Rjyan C Kidwell

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.

Against Nature

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