Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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He finally came to the conclusion that, for the most part, the world was composed of bullies and imbeciles.

The novel contains waxing descriptions of a multitude of surrealist experiences, including the death of a tortoise and the blooming of a garden. If you enjoyed Against Nature , you might like Huysmans's The Damned (La-Bas) , also available in Penguin Classics. And if that doesn’t sound suspiciously like the world of 2013, then you’re just not paying attention. Huysmans initially tried to placate him by claiming the book was still in the Naturalist style and that Des Esseintes's opinions and tastes were not his own. As if further recommendation were needed, it is widely believed to be the unnamed “poisonous French book” read by Dorian Gray, which contributes to his corruption.

As the first and most prominent group of authors to subscribe to the tenets, principles and stylistic aesthetic of the genre, it could even be put forth therefore that this book is the rock upon which the abandoned and deconsecrated church of Decadence has been built. He [Baudelaire] had revealed the morbid psychology of a mind that has reached the autumn of its experiences, had described the symptoms of a soul conscripted by suffering and licensed by spleen, had exposed the growing decay of feeling after the enthusiasm and belief of youth have evaporated . While perfumes and their appeal tends to be a matter of individual taste, I can only speak for myself in bafflement as to their ubiquity of usage – expensive, unappealing, and ultimately failing to mask the natural scents users are so desperate to eradicate, there are few more vain wastes of time and money and offense to the nostrils than these. Gautier himself had significant 'decadent' credentials - just try his 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin! Des Esseintes likes exotic, fantastical paintings and books as they help him flee the vulgar drudgery of everyday life.

Having started with La-Bas and working my way backwards through En Rade to Parisian Sketches (with a side trip to Sac A Dos and Robert Baldick’s surprisingly entertaining and informative Life of J. According to Montesquiou writing many years later in his memoirs, the sight of these marvels left Mallarmé speechless with amazement. The sociopath cannibal has his mental palace stuffed full of fine art, through which he walks in his imagination. Is it any good, this story about a man pottering about his house, living in his head, his imagination feeding off itself, slowly going mad?What, in fact, were all the evangelical pharmacopoeias compared with his treatises on spiritual hygiene? Another French text mentioned in Dorian Gray is Theophile Gautier's collection of poems 'Emaux et Camees' (Enamels and Cameos), and it was in Gautier's prefatory 'note' to the 1868 edition of Fleurs du mal that the phrase 'Decadence' was used to describe this literature of the later nineteenth century (it had been used earlier in the century by Desiré Nisard to describe, pejoratively, Latin poets of the late Roman Empire). Huysmans predicted his novel would be a failure with the public and critics: "It will be the biggest fiasco of the year—but I don't care a damn! The leading figures of the movement included the two French men, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin, but Symbolism was not limited to France with other practitioners including the Norwegian Edvard Munch, the Austrian Gustav Klimt and the British Aubrey Beardsley. In the end, “whatever he tried, an immense feeling of ennui oppressed him…then his health grew weaker and his nervous system more strained,” until he finally decides to create a sanctuary of intellectual and artistic stimulation off in the suburbs, near enough to Paris to reassure him, but far enough away to isolate him from “a hateful age of undignified boorishness.

I have this idea that people are translating old texts better now than they used to; for one, translation studies is growing in academia, and for two, translators are less interested in “smoothing over” some roughnesses or X-ratednesses to attract “sensitive” readers. The latter has far more annotation, especially for the surveys of Latin and French "decadent" literature, but you really don't need that for more than your first reading. Fun fact: In Real Life, Huysmans was a civil servant and worked for the French Interior Ministry, on whose stationery he wrote his novels.From what I’ve read of his letters, he seemed to be constantly dissatisfied with how people perceived him and his work. In a letter of November 1882, Huysmans told Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy".