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Title: Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Robert Baldick, Patrick McGuiness, Patrick McGuinness ISBN: 0-14-044763-6 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 24 February, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.92 (25 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A quiet, bizarre masterpiece
Comment: I love this decadent French novel! Hilariously absurd. The non-hero locks himself away in his bizarre home, and spends every other chapter commenting on his tastes in literature, music, art, cologne, food, etc, while experimenting with his effete senses and trying to make life bearable amidst his world-weary wealth and need for sublime excitement. (Many a modern disaffected suburban youth may be able to identify with this.) In so doing he simply becomes more withdrawn and ill, demonstrating the impossibility of living apart from real life. I especially like the part where he makes up his mind to go to London, but finds all the Englishness he needs by simply sitting the train station, and retires home again. One other critic said of the author and critic Huysmans that he would either commit suicide or retreat into the arms of the church. Indeed, he did the latter, having found that renouncing everything left him with nothing. This is a novel for those with sophisticated taste, and a keen sense of the absurd.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best edition of decadent classic
Comment: Assuming that this "Viking" edition is in fact the Penguin edition or some relation, this is by far the preferred edition of Huysmans' strange masterwork. The translation by Robert Baldick, Huysmans' most trustworthy biographer, is not only NOT slightly censored like the earlier English one reprinted by Dover... it's also a much livelier read. Which is important because, after all, there's not much of a conventional plot here; the story such as it is depicts the gradual enervation of a decadent aristocrat as he exhausts the pleasure to be found in every pleasure he can think of.
Huysmans was literature's great complainer, capable of finding the misery and ennui in any situation-- even bachelorhood in late 19th century Paris. And while the book is regarded mainly as a manual for decadent living (Dorian Gray kept it by his bed), full of recherche and recondite indulgences, Huysmans' depiction of the unending quest for novelty and sensation is also drolly funny at times-- as in the scene in which an impotent des Esseintes takes up with a ventriloquist in the hopes that she can get a rise out of him by impersonating her own husband threatening violence outside the door while they copulate
Rating: 5
Summary: "Not for years had he stuffed and swilled with such abandon"
Comment: The sole descendant of the once robust des Esseintes family is Duc Jean Floressas de Esseintes. Centuries of inbreeding have produced a sickly, puny specimen. His mother, who did not have a strong mental or physical constitution, died when he was 17 years old. The late Duchess "had a nervous attack whenever she was subjected to light or noise." Jean is educated at a Jesuit school where he is rather spoiled, and as a result he remains unfocused. Jean goes through several phases--debauchery followed by an attempt to mingle with the intelligentsia. While Jean is still a young man, he is totally jaded with humanity and concludes, "the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels." Jean begins to experience encroaching horror at the idea of contact with the masses, and he dreams of a sanctuary where "he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity." Jean takes his fortune and attempts to create a perfect world for himself within his house. He believes that "Nature...has had her day." "Human ingenuity" is superior and can manufacture perfection, and so Jean builds his house with this idea in mind.
This book is certainly NOT for all tastes. Some readers will be bored to tears, but the novel fascinated me. Jean really is a pathetic, sad creature, but his thought processes were infinitely interesting. He is self-centered and indulges every selfish, peevish whim. He even goes so far as having a tortoise "embellished" with a jewel-encrusted shell. The author explores every tiny crevice of Jean's motivations, and I loved it. For example, 13 pages were spent describing why Jean likes or loathes particular Latin authors, and several pages describe a painting of Salome. In spite of the many flaws in Jean's character, nonetheless, he remains a fascinatingly corrupted and warped study. I particularly enjoyed Jean's fixations--his short-lived desire to travel to England, his love affair with a ventriloquist, and his obsession with perfumes, for example. For those interested in reading literature from the Decadent Period, I highly recommend "Against Nature"--displacedhuman
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Title: The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau, Alvah C. Bessie ISBN: 0965104265 Publisher: Juno Books Pub. Date: 31 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.99 |
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Title: The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France by Asti Hustvedt ISBN: 1890951072 Publisher: Zone Books Pub. Date: 18 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $34.00 |
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Title: The Masterpiece (Oxford World's Classics) by Emile Zola, Thomas Walton, Roger Pearson ISBN: 0192839632 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Bel-Ami by Guy De Maupassant, Douglas Parmee ISBN: 0140443150 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: November, 1975 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Damned: La-Bas (Penguin Classics) by Terry Hale, Joris-Karl Huysman, J. -K Huysmans ISBN: 0140447679 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $8.00 |
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