Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

by Joris-Karl Huysmans (Author), Patrick McGuinness (Introduction), Robert Baldick (Translator)

• New

  Paperback
  2003

  $11.88

  Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray , Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (A Rebours) is translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness in Penguin Classics . A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, Against Nature contains only one character. Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where her indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Against Nature , in the words of the author, exploded 'like a meteorite' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day. This revised edition of Robert Baldick's lucid translation features a new introduction and a chronology, and reproduces Huysmans' original 1903 preface as well as a selection of reviews from writers including Mallarme, Zola and Wilde. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siecle imagination. He was a career civil servant who wrote ten novels, most notably A Rebours and La-Bas . If you enjoyed Against Nature , you might like Huysmans' The Damned (La-Bas) , also available in Penguin Classics .

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $8.75

  'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private museum of high taste, he offers Huysmans's readers a treasure trove of cultural delights which anticipates many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarme and Poe. This new translation is supplemented by indispensable notes which enhance the understanding of a highly allusive work.