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Against Nature: (A Rebours) (Oxford World's Classics)

Against Nature: (A Rebours) (Oxford World's Classics)

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Against Nature
Review: Against Nature is a book that deserves its own category. The book touches upon issues and conflicts that all intelectuals (both young and mature) face. The book is well written and is a great complement to someone that is experimenting with decadent type literature. I highly recommend this book. I also recommend that you check out some of the literature that the author recommends in the book, both the ones he praises and the ones he detests. In addition this book is what kept Dorian Gray up and knowing this linkage gave this book a great reputation. In addition one should remember the authenticity of this book as the other never expected it to do well, one could see why after reading it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best edition of decadent classic
Review: Assuming that this "Viking" edition is in fact the Penguin edition or some relation, this is by far the preferred edition of Huysmans' strange masterwork. The translation by Robert Baldick, Huysmans' most trustworthy biographer, is not only NOT slightly censored like the earlier English one reprinted by Dover... it's also a much livelier read. Which is important because, after all, there's not much of a conventional plot here; the story such as it is depicts the gradual enervation of a decadent aristocrat as he exhausts the pleasure to be found in every pleasure he can think of.

Huysmans was literature's great complainer, capable of finding the misery and ennui in any situation-- even bachelorhood in late 19th century Paris. And while the book is regarded mainly as a manual for decadent living (Dorian Gray kept it by his bed), full of recherche and recondite indulgences, Huysmans' depiction of the unending quest for novelty and sensation is also drolly funny at times-- as in the scene in which an impotent des Esseintes takes up with a ventriloquist in the hopes that she can get a rise out of him by impersonating her own husband threatening violence outside the door while they copulate

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A poor substitute for Baldick's translation
Review: Frankly, I wrote this commentary on Margaret Mauldon's translation of A Rebours to divert the buyer to a much better one, that is, the classic translation by Robert Baldick, also available from Amazon.com.
This new modernized translation is supposed to be truer to the french original text, but it is not so. It's thorny and crammed with clashing sentences and too many words. Take for instance the prologue,
"Cramped and confined within those old frames where their great shoulders stretched across from side to side..."
Now compare this with Baldick's version which is more to the point,
"Imprisoned in old picture-frames which were scarcely wide enough for their broad shoulders.."
It's also obvious that Baldick's translation is much truer to the musical language that Huysmans wrote his book in. In fact Baldick mentions it in his preface to the translation. His assesment of A Rebours is also valuable for the understanding of the author's accomplishment.
The only thing valuable in this poor substitute is the appendix which consists of Huysmans' preface to A Rebours written twenty years after the novel. But to compare Baldick's translation, written in the late fifties, with this grammatical scramble is like comparing a nightingale's song to a cricket's. I sincerely recommend you rather buy Baldick's translation over this one.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Against Nature?! I don't think so...
Review: How can he be Against Nature?! This book was translated from French, so it might be translated wrong. I think that if this man is really against nature, he must be a pretty angry guy. Nature is where we get food, shelter, clothing. This guy's crazy! If you're against nature, than you're against everything else, because everything comes from nature. If you've ever heard of Thoreau, you'd know that nature is something we should respect and cherish. Don't read this book, read "Walden" instead. There's a good book.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: An anti-natural decadent
Review: Huysmans' account of Des Esseintes's retreat into hermetic chambers, his cultivation of his overly refined tastes and forays into arcane erudition - (all rendered in an idiosyncratic idiom that avails itself of recherché details and descriptions)- stands as one of the most striking of the novels of the literary decadence, the movement which propounded a cult of the artificial in combination with a studied amorality. The anti hero, or non-hero, of "Against Nature", Des Esseintes, an eccentric, neurasthenic, and a scion of an ancient ducal title, derives seemingly immense gratification from his amoral antics, as in his ruining the marriage of his friend, D' Aigurande, and also the episode in which he leads a teenage urchin to a brothel, with a view to corrupting him, and thus breeding him into a murderer, "one enemy the more," he declares, "of the hideous society which is bleeding us white." In his isolated domicile, he banishes all that is natural and becomes a connossieur of the artificial. Some of his bizarre experiments consist in his smelling the "colour" of his perfumes, and his "hearing" the music of his liqueurs. The novel, which is highly experimental in form and almost dispenses altogether with a narrative structure, is also one of the most subversive, a defiant cry against the supposedly Philistine standards dominating art and design and the increasing respectability of the artistic profession. Required reading for those who delight in the criminal, the perverse, the morbid and the exotic.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A quiet, bizarre masterpiece
Review: I love this decadent French novel! Hilariously absurd. The non-hero locks himself away in his bizarre home, and spends every other chapter commenting on his tastes in literature, music, art, cologne, food, etc, while experimenting with his effete senses and trying to make life bearable amidst his world-weary wealth and need for sublime excitement. (Many a modern disaffected suburban youth may be able to identify with this.) In so doing he simply becomes more withdrawn and ill, demonstrating the impossibility of living apart from real life. I especially like the part where he makes up his mind to go to London, but finds all the Englishness he needs by simply sitting the train station, and retires home again. One other critic said of the author and critic Huysmans that he would either commit suicide or retreat into the arms of the church. Indeed, he did the latter, having found that renouncing everything left him with nothing. This is a novel for those with sophisticated taste, and a keen sense of the absurd.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: is escape from nature through human artifice is a BAD thing?
Review: I really enjoyed all the elaborate over exuberant decadent descriptions of luxury as the main character tricks out his morbid mansion. like the adams family.

but that all that fun and imagination peters out about halfway through. then the book takes a dive into sniveling whining and complaining. yuck. but - i still give it 5 stars because the first half is *that* good.


Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Despite the absurd central character, essential reading
Review: In the early 21st century, the primary reason for reading this unusual novel is historical: it exerted a phenomenal influence on the taste of late 19th century France and England. Although there is good reason to suspect that Huysmans's considered Des Esseintes a rather farcical creature, hordes of young aesthetes took his literary and artistic judgments with the utmost seriousness, apparently not noticing that his "experiment in living" was an abject failure.

One reason for many to read this book is the fact that the primary model for the character of Des Esseintes was the mildly notorious Robert de Montesquiou, who had the distinction of having been the inspiration for two memorable characters in French fiction. His portrait, in fact, adorns the cover of the Penguin Classics edition. Comte de Montesquiou also was the model for the memorable Baron de Charlus in Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.

One of the important cultural functions that A REBOURS played in late 20th century France and Britain (it exerted virtually no influence in Germany or the United States) was to provide a laundry list of what was cool and what was not for the would be effete dandy. As a result, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Poe, Wagner, Redon, Moreau, Pascal, Schopenhauer, medieval sacred music, exotic flowers, artifice, affectation, and various and sundry similar artists and items made the cut, while Beethoven, Kant, Balzac, natural beauty, the social virtues, love, and a host of other seemingly worthwhile beings and ideas did not.

What is astonishing is how many people take Huysmans seriously, while he himself certainly intended this as a bit of a joke. Des Esseintes is, on any conceivable standard, a bore and a fool. His pretensions, his self-indulgence, his all-consuming narcissism cannot possibly be used as the basis of a life philosophy, and the vast bulk of his cultural pontifications are borderline absurd. His misanthropy is so extreme that it is impossible to have the slightest degree of sympathy with him. The complete revulsion when he sees the face of another human being is obviously intended to be comic in its effect. When, at the end of the book, his project to live completely apart from all others ends in failure, Huysmans clearly means this as a practical judgment on such foolery. The effect from beginning to end is meant to be satirical and comical. That so many took it seriously is nearly as funny. Huysmans's himself lived a life completely antithetical to that of Des Esseintes's, working his entire adult life in a government ministry, a career bureaucrat. And there is no indication that he would have liked to trade places with Des Esseintes.

The book is, however, quite fascinating. One would imagine it nearly impossible to write a 200-page novel that dispenses almost entirely with plot and instead details the rather silly and self-indulgent judgments about everything. It is not an easy read. I fought hard the temptation to skip three or four pages at a shot. His long, drawn out discussions of completely forgotten and minor figures lead to unpleasant reading, and even the discussions of famous and well known figures are scarcely better. Some eccentric details are marvelous, such as Des Esseintes's insistent that his female servant don a nun's costume when she goes to the shed in the back, to preserve the illusion that he is in a monastery, or the ship's dining room that he has built inside his regular dining room.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: don't listen to misterb1020
Review: That moron missed the whole point of the book, which is that escape from nature through human artifice is a BAD thing, ultimately futile, tragic and ridiculous.

And I might add that Thoreau probably wouldn't have enjoyed nature so much if his mommy hadn't brought him cookies from time to time out to the cabin...



Rating: 5 stars
Summary: "Not for years had he stuffed and swilled with such abandon"
Review: The sole descendant of the once robust des Esseintes family is Duc Jean Floressas de Esseintes. Centuries of inbreeding have produced a sickly, puny specimen. His mother, who did not have a strong mental or physical constitution, died when he was 17 years old. The late Duchess "had a nervous attack whenever she was subjected to light or noise." Jean is educated at a Jesuit school where he is rather spoiled, and as a result he remains unfocused. Jean goes through several phases--debauchery followed by an attempt to mingle with the intelligentsia. While Jean is still a young man, he is totally jaded with humanity and concludes, "the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels." Jean begins to experience encroaching horror at the idea of contact with the masses, and he dreams of a sanctuary where "he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity." Jean takes his fortune and attempts to create a perfect world for himself within his house. He believes that "Nature...has had her day." "Human ingenuity" is superior and can manufacture perfection, and so Jean builds his house with this idea in mind.

This book is certainly NOT for all tastes. Some readers will be bored to tears, but the novel fascinated me. Jean really is a pathetic, sad creature, but his thought processes were infinitely interesting. He is self-centered and indulges every selfish, peevish whim. He even goes so far as having a tortoise "embellished" with a jewel-encrusted shell. The author explores every tiny crevice of Jean's motivations, and I loved it. For example, 13 pages were spent describing why Jean likes or loathes particular Latin authors, and several pages describe a painting of Salome. In spite of the many flaws in Jean's character, nonetheless, he remains a fascinatingly corrupted and warped study. I particularly enjoyed Jean's fixations--his short-lived desire to travel to England, his love affair with a ventriloquist, and his obsession with perfumes, for example. For those interested in reading literature from the Decadent Period, I highly recommend "Against Nature"--displacedhuman


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