They were hedonists… gambling their fortunes on horses, cards and on all those pleasures dear to hollow men. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. I was truly absorbed in it, and upon finishing it realized that story was less interesting than anyone's life yet the descriptions will mesmerize and hold you to the end.

Then he had kept mistresses already famed for their depravity, and helped to swell the funds of those agencies which supply dubious pleasures for a consideration. 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! His complete devotion to his Decadent lifestyle, in spite of his detrimental impact on his health, and despite the fact that it never really gives him the satisfaction he craves, is almost admirable.The one area I do strongly disagree with des Esseintes on is the apparent centrality to the novel of his distaste for nature (an assertion incidentally disproven by his delight in flora, however unusual or bizarre the specimens he selects) and his polemicizing over artificiality. To understand and appreciate this book, which by its very nature seems to reject the reader, or perhaps to withdraw from the reader any semblance of the forms of contact and intimacy that are the usual business of one person writing and another person reading the words, is to accept that the process by which we come together in this case is ultimately bizarre. We get a comprehensive survey of numerous areas and disciplines to which that character dedicates himself, from exotic flora and parfumerie to a critical survey of the annals of ancient Roman history to the religious apologia of the Middle Ages, and again of some fairly modern contemporaneous poets, authors and artists of Huysmans’ era and preference. Upon finishing it, I can honestly say I've never really read anything like it in classical literature.

In terms of the book being the sine non qua of Decadence as a literary movement, there’s both truth and fallacy to that statement.As such it is one of the strangest movements in the Modernist era, linking figures as various as Baudelaire and Edward Burne-Jones. Landow created the HTML design and formatted the text, adding French accents, which the Gutenberg text omits, and both ilustrations and links to materials on this site. It's the feature of his style he tends to be most remembered for in French literature, and given that there's a lot of description of lavish furnishings, art works, antique objects and so on, he gets plenty of opportunity to use it. In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of " Decadent" literature, [1] inspiring works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). 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.

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. 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. 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. Des Esseintes likes exotic, fantastical paintings and books as they help him flee the vulgar drudgery of everyday life. This haven which had sheltered him must be abandoned, he must sail out again into the stormy seas of stupidity that had so battered him in the past…the doctors spoke of amusement, of distraction; with whom and with what…?Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking.