Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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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. Culturally Religious: Des Esseintes had a Catholic upbringing and was instructed by the Jesuits, but at some point he abandoned the faith and turned to the philosophical ideas of the German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewellery, perfumes, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant.

I’ve experienced and seen all I wanted to…I’ve been saturated with English life since my departure…what aberration was I suffering from…to believe, like some complete fool, in the necessity, interest and benefit of a real excursion?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!

I got much, much more out of this novel than I was expecting, but I also understand why someone would not like this book. After the whole was arranged and finished, all these several tints fell into accord at night and did not clash at all; the blue of the woodwork struck a stable note that was pleasing and satisfying to the eye, supported and warmed, so to say, by the surrounding shades of orange, which for their part shone out with a pure, unsullied gorgeousness, itself backed up and in a way heightened by the near presence of the blue.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. The sexuality of Wilde's version of Salome's dance differs greatly from that mentioned in the New Testament. The term “bulimia” has existed long before the 20thC diagnosis, but it seems always to have referred to overeating, not so much craving or hunger. He found, too, a peculiar pleasure in being…the only person up and about amid sleeping shadow-enshrouded houses…a singular satisfaction know to late night workers, when drawing aside the curtain of their window, they realize that everything around them is dark, that all is silent, that all is dead. To be fair to des Esseintes, he falls at the aesthetic, "surround myself with gorgeous objects" end of the spectrum.

But that in itself does not invalidate the remainder of the novel, its assertions, or what the man is striving to create – an attempt to rise above, or at least remove oneself from, a distasteful decline in culture and disagreement with the crassness of economists and the like about the centrality of Mammon as motivator and rationale for human discourse and life aims.Huysman's erudite encapsulations of Classical history and literature are marked by a strong sense of the privileged position he was able, by means of his wealth, to attain. One passion and one only—woman—might have arrested the universal contempt that was taking hold of him, but that passion like the rest had been exhausted. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

As such it is one of the strangest movements in the Modernist era, linking figures as various as Baudelaire and Edward Burne-Jones. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming . The overall picture painted is one of an unprincipled society drifting further and further into meaningless drivel to fill the void left behind by religion and community.

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.