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Title: Against the Grain (A Rebours). by Joris Karl, Huysmans ISBN: 0-8446-0719-3 Publisher: Peter Smith Pub Pub. Date: January, 1969 Format: Textbook Binding List Price(USD): $6.75 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: An experiment in eccentricity
Comment: Des Esseintes, the protagonist (and basically the only character) of this book, is a man of noble descent who has tried everything in life: he has mingled with the frivolous and found them vulgar and empty-headed. He has lived among the intellectuals and found them petulant and arrogant. He is tired of life, especially in these (his) vulgar and superficial times. So he sells a number of properties and buys a house in the countryside. His idea is to reject everything that is "natural" and concentrate on art and artifice. He lives in complete solitude, barely interrupted by a couple of silent servants. He spends much time choosing the colors, the furniture and the pictures for his house. Along the book we are witnesses to his tastes in a number of realms, such as painting, literature, flowers, perfumes and music. Sometimes it seems to be just a long catalogue of sophisticated, rare and decadent pieces. This book is a big fantasy of reclusion, of elegancy, of sophistication. Give yourself some time and be an eccentric for a day. If you read it with a sense of humor, you'll find an enjoyable piece of French décadentisme, certainly on the periphery of the Western Canon, but representative of a way to view life.
Its atmosphere is very Gothic, gloomy, silent and full of beautiful things. The main character is a bit of a lunatic, but his bored and irritable personality has a touch of glamour. If you sometimes feel filled up with the world, if you sometimes fantasize about winning the lottery and then buying a big house full of the things you love, a place to retire and reject society and all its annoying and ugly characteristics, then you will find this book a very cool way of retiring from the world.
Rating: 5
Summary: Lucky for you it's still in print!
Comment: I read this book 20 years ago and still consider it one of my very favorites. It is so good to see that it is still in print. I'll just add a bit more to what the other reviewers at amazon have said. This book was a favorite of Picasso, and it's easy to understand why. Huysmans was the ultimate modern artist, and had he not become a writer he would have assuredly become a painter. Des Esseintes decorates the shell of a living tortoise with jewels and colored glass so that the light, reflected off the roving gems, accentuates the colors of the room, adding continuous and subtle variation. Now that is a sense of color! His heighten senses go further to invent new art forms: a perfume organ, for instance. Des Essentes, is also a bit of a sadist. He conducts social experiments, turning innocent ordinary working class youths into criminals by cultivating within them a taste of luxury. By the way, if you can, try obtaining a copy of the book with Arthur Zaidenberg's illustrations; they are an exquisite addition. Huysmans other books are also worth reading, especially Down There (la-Bas), a book about 19th century French Satanism that nicely weaves stories about the extreme Medieval sadist, Gilles de Rais, whom Huysmans portrays as an aesthete much like Des Esseintes. Both books are gems.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Ultimate Social Dropout
Comment: Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Against the Grain (A Rebours), is, without a doubt, literature's ultimate social dropout. Dissatisfied with the limitations of the natural world, he hides from human society, constructing his life so that even his own servants are invisible to him.
While looking at others with disdain (and this is putting it mildly!), Des Esseintes's opinion of himself grows ever higher until he has "no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with that of an author or scholar."
Just as Des Esseintes eschews the natural, he embraces the artificial. In an early chapter, he chooses the colors for his country house near Paris based on their appearance under artificial light. He comes to the conclusion that one can obtain a satisfactory sea bath at home because "without stirring out of Pris it is possible to obtain the health-giving impression of sea-bathing...for all this involves is a visit to the Bain Vigier, an establishment to be seen down on a pontoon moored in the middle of the Seine."
Eventually, Des Esseintes moves beyond mere artifice and seeks to remove from his life the natural in all its aspects. When he becomes unable to ingest food orally, he feeds himself through enemas and finds this method far superior.
Des Esseintes's realm of artifice soon becomes his only god. He is safe in his virtuality, enjoying travel without risks, lust without passion and social interaction only with imagined beings.
The heart and soul of Against the Grain is really the debate between nature and artifice and man's role as the creator of his own universe. Des Esseintes is the ultimate aesthete; a man whose desire to obliterate the natural is transformed into the limitless experience of artistic creation.
Against the Grain represents typical French decadent literature in which the whole is subordinate to the parts. It must be understood that decadence in literature is an aesthetic, rather than a moral conception; the opposite of classicism, in which each part must subordinate itself to the enhancement of the whole. Each has its virtures, and in order to appreciate one to the fullest, we must learn to understand and appreciate the other.
Against the Grain may well be the greatest novel to emerge from the French decadent experience, and it has exerted much influence over later writers. It is the fullest, most detailed account of the search for artifice, a search that is particularly akin to today's virtual world of cyberspace. As such, Against the Grain is more relevant than ever and should be highly recommended, even required, reading.
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Title: Maldoror and the Complete Works by Lautreamont, Alexis Lykiard, Comte De Lautreamont, Lautreamont Chants De Maldoror, Lautreamont Poesies, Conte de Lautreamont, Comte De Lautreamont ISBN: 187897212X Publisher: Exact Change Pub. Date: July, 1994 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau, Alvah C. Bessie ISBN: 0965104265 Publisher: Juno Books Pub. Date: 31 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.99 |
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Title: Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Robert Baldick ISBN: 0140440860 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: May, 1959 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Damned: La-Bas (Penguin Classics) by Terry Hale, Joris-Karl Huysman, J. -K Huysmans ISBN: 0140447679 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $8.00 |
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Title: Nadja by Andre Breton, Richard Howard ISBN: 0802150268 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: December, 1988 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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