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Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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This Penguin is on bright, white paper, and with larger type (though consequently is also a bit larger in size). He had tasted the sweets of the flesh like a crotchety invalid with a craving for food but a palate which soon becomes jaded. It essentially aspired to separate literature and art from the materialistic preoccupations of industrialized society, and morals being of secondary concern, if at all, led to the depiction of such depravities, and A Rebours was one of those books. There is no central romance, no big cliffhanger, no dramatic build to draw the unsophisticated reader into the narrative.

Upon finishing it, I can honestly say I've never really read anything like it in classical literature.I do not doubt therefore that it was in the most admiring, sympathetic and sincere good faith that he retailed to Huysmans what he had seen during the few moments he spent in Ali Baba's cave.

In fact, perfumes are almost never produced from the flowers whose names they bear; the artist who dared to borrow only natural elements would produce nothing but a bastard work with neither authenticity or style, seeing as the essence obtained by the distillation of flowers offers only a very distant and imprecise analogy to the actual aroma of the living flower, as it disperses its effusions in the open air. Patrick McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Anne's College. Huysmans’s Against the Grain: The Willed Exile of the Introverted Decadent," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. the universal admiration (Goya’s) works had won had…put him off slightly, and he had refrained from framing them for some years, for fear that by putting them on show, the first idiot who caught sight of them would deem it necessary to relieve himself of his banal opinions and to go into raptures in front of them, in a completely conventional fashion. As critics from all sides lambasted this book, and him for writing such a wretched thing, one critic stood out to him by simply saying, "After such a book, it only remains for the author to choose between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross.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. Des Esseintes likes exotic, fantastical paintings and books as they help him flee the vulgar drudgery of everyday life. Des Esseintes conjures up pretend worlds for himself too, with the aid of perfumes which he mixes together to make powerfully suggestive scents. I'm just focusing on the edition: the 2004 Penguin Classics reprint of Robert Baldick's 1956 translation but with a new introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness (and a new cover, of which more anon). 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?

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