Against the Grain - Softcover

Huysmans, Joris-Karl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598189417 ISBN 13: 9781598189414

Publisher: Alan Rodgers Books, 2006

Synopsis

Against the Grain's 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.

"There was only one living scion of this family which had once been so numerous that it had occupied all the territories of the Ile-de-France and La Brie. The Duc Jean was a slender, nervous young man of thirty, with hollow cheeks, cold, steel-blue eyes, a straight, thin nose and delicate hands." Thus we are introduced to the character of Des Esseintes in a novel that has been banned and censored for years, but still lives on as being one of the finest examples of the "decadent" literature written by fin-de-siecle (late nineteenth century) writers. Oscar Wilde himself called the novel "the Breviary of Decadence."

About this title

About the Author

Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (1848 - 1907 in Paris) was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans. He is most famous for the novel À rebours (1884, published in English as Against the Grain or Against Nature). He supported himself by a 30-year career in the French civil service. Huysmans' work is considered remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, large vocabulary, descriptions, satirical wit and far-ranging erudition. First considered part of Naturalism, he became associated with the decadent movement with his publication of À rebours. His work expressed his deep pessimism, which had led him to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. In later years, his novels reflected his study of Catholicism, religious conversion and becoming an oblate. 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.

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

About this edition

• Publisher: Alan Rodgers Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1598189417
• ISBN 13: 9781598189414
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232