Against Nature: A New Translation of 'a Rebours' (Penguin Classics)

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Now, think of how else that space could have been used: what would you rather know instead of those jingles? surrounded by art and a library of books at his fingertips, he takes to the works of Poe, Balzac, De Sade, voltaire, along with poetry and historical readings of the church, religion and medieval ramblings. Written in 1884 at the beginning of the avant-garde art movement that launched 20 th -century modernism and abstraction, Huysmans tells the tale of an aristocrat repulsed by a Paris transformed by urbanization, commercialization, and massive immigration who builds himself a ‘Fortress of Solitude’ in a quiet suburb and interacts with the world through his imagination with the help of a loyal servant who maintained his physical milieu, silently serving meals and performing domestic tasks. Perhaps this book can be seen as the ultimate anti-novel in the sense that it does not feature any trappings of a book designed to entertain.

It became prominent in Britain after it was discovered that a passage in Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, in which a licentious book has a powerful effect on the protagonist, referred to Huysmans's work - it is this very passage that is excerpted on the front panel of the dust jacket here. Endeavouring to “rejoice beyond the bounds of time…” and to make the world shudder at his joy the main hero turns his life into a perfect diamond of decadence… But the decadent ways take their toll. His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), which were strongly influenced by Baudelaire. I always assumed that nineteenth-century French literature would be either too highbrow or too earnest—until I read this book.

Twenty-three-year-old Schopenhauer, who had a great influence on Huysmans, told Wieland: "Life is an unpleasant business. 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.

His Là-bas (1891) attracted considerable attention for its portrayal of Satanism in France in the late 1880s. Les Églises de Paris Archived 2006-12-06 at the Wayback Machine, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions de Paris, 2005. Her ne kadar iki sessiz uşağı ile beraber çekildiği bu izbede sanatsal( simgeciler, gerçeküstücüler ve ölü Latin dili incelemeleri) İsevi( ilk günah ve dünyaya atılmış olma) olaylar değil nesneler dünyası ve hatta Schopenhauer ( Yeryüzünde yaşamak gerçekten bir düşkünlük) gibi sağlam gerekçe ve referansları olsa da Des Esseintes son kertede dönemin zehirlediğ bir karakterdir ve içine kapandığı tecrit hali sağlık sorunlarına yol açmaya başlar. It was late at night when the poet was shown over the house, and the only illumination came from a few scattered candelabra; yet in the flickering light Mallarmé observed that the door-bell was in fact a sacring-bell, that one room was furnished as a monastery cell and another as the cabin of a yacht, and that the third contained a Louis Quinze pulpit, three or four cathedral stalls and a strip of altar railing. In his preface for the 1903 publication of the novel, Huysmans wrote that he had the idea to portray a man "soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings .

The basic premise is that Des Esseintes, the novel’s anti-hero, has become so disillusioned with modern society and the pettiness of those around him that he decides to hole himself up in a rural French mansion, cut off from everyone, and dedicate himself to the pursuit of sensation. Chapter-by-chapter, Des Essentiales, alone in his solitary French house, absorbs himself in his him intellectual pursuits and invites the reader to join him. sur l’art (1867-1905) Archived 2008-11-14 at the Wayback Machine, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions Bartillat, 2006.