Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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He even has the woman wear a nun-style coif to avoid being put off by her silhouette seen through his windows. Salome was already in rehearsals for a 1892 London premiere, but was banned by the Lord Chamberlain's Office for its portrayal of BIblical figures on stage. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. The sociopath cannibal has his mental palace stuffed full of fine art, through which he walks in his imagination.

In one of the more amusing passages, Des Esseintes, after reading the novels of Dickens, decides to take a trip to England. It essentially aspired to separate literature and art from the materialistic preoccupations of industrialized society, and morals being of secondary concern, if at all, led to the depiction of such depravities, and A Rebours was one of those books. She performs a dance for King Herod, the Dance of Seven Scarves, and afterwords she requests the head of John the Bapitist on a silver platter.

The novel focuses on the young dandy and aesthete, Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, who becomes disgusted with the society of his day and tries to escape from it by constructing a "refined Thebaid" - a house where he lives completely alone, surrounded by the artistic objects and books that obsess him and living out his aesthetic daydreams. The styles of the Symbolist painters varied considerably, but they shared many of the same themes particularly a fascination with the mystical and the visionary.

For example, his two servants (of course he has servants) live and work on a separate floor of the house to him and he usually communicates with them by ringing bells. And finally, weary to the point of satiety of these hackneyed luxuries, these commonplace caresses, he had sought satisfaction in the gutter, hoping that the contrast would revive his exhausted desires and imagining that the fascinating filthiness of the poor would stimulate his flagging senses. And Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours (usually translated into English as Against Nature or Against the Grain) is quite possibly the classic Decadent text.in a period devoted to money-making, lived apart…sheltered from the stupidity surrounding him…taking pleasure, far from society, in the revelations of the mind, in the visions of the brain, refining…concepts…in lightly hinted inferences linked by a berely perceptible thread. Artificial flowers fool no one, and rather than freshening the room with oxygen, merely collect and breed dust mites. Mundane Made Awesome: Des Esseintes' "hobbies" (the word seems inadequate) are described by Huysmans in lavish style and as if they are of epic importance, which to the central character, they are. His novel The Last Hundred Days was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award, and his second novel, Throw me to the Wolves , won the 2020 Encore Award. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.