In the Library
Against Nature
J.K. Huysmans, 1884
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 6 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Groves and Michaux
- Chapters
- Chapters 18
- Length
- Length 80k words
£1.99
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Nature has had her day;
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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Des Esseintes keeps a private edition of these poems and calls Baudelaire his master, and this is the sensibility he learned from: beauty found in decay, artifice, and the forbidden.
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Steppenwolf
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Both novels follow a solitary, hyper-refined man who has walled himself off from ordinary bourgeois life, and both watch that wall start to crack.
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About the book
Des Esseintes buys a tortoise and has its shell crusted with gold and gemstones, to finish the color scheme of his Persian carpet. Within days the animal is dead, crushed by the weight of its own borrowed splendor, and he moves on undeterred to the next refinement: a liqueur organ tuned to taste like an orchestra, hothouse orchids bred to look like the diseases they resemble, a library he no longer reads for story, only for the pleasure of one perfect sentence. Huysmans built a novel almost without plot around one man's attempt to seal himself away from other people and live entirely by taste, and the terror of the book is how far that taste can be refined before the body simply gives out under it. By the end his nerves are ruined and his doctor orders him back to Paris, back among the noise and stink of other men he built this whole house to escape. Des Esseintes prays to a God he does not believe in, begging only to be spared the return to ordinary life.