Against Nature (Against the Grain)

By: Joris-Karl Huysmans

Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton

Against Nature was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884, it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society.

Des Esseintes, a minor aristocrat but a high intellectual - deeply cultured and well-read - can no longer bear contemporary Parisian life in any of its forms! As a youth he had experienced the monastic environment and later academic life, but, remaining unfulfilled, he immersed himself in the multifarious sensual pleasures so readily available in Paris.

Still deeply unsatisfied, he decides to move to a house in a village in the countryside. Here he can create his own controlled environment with a minutely designed interior supporting his particular artistic tastes. At last he can live alone with his books, his reflections, and his needs. Nothing will interfere with how he wants to live, what he wants to see, to read, to study, to smell, to eat. However, a life of such total personal indulgence, even on a lofty intellectual and artistically sensitive plane, proves anything but easy - or satisfying.

The character of Des Esseintes, intense, testing, infuriating, but astonishing, was said to have been influenced by the famous aesthete of the time, the Comte de Montesquiou (also a model for Baron de Charlus in Proust's In Search of Lost Time), while Against Nature makes an unmistakeable appearance in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nicholas Boulton here reads one of the best early translations (published anonymously and originally titled Against the Grain), which has been revised to reinstate sections originally cut to protect sensibilities of the time. It is the full novel as Huysmans intended.

Public Domain (P)2017 Ukemi Productions Ltd

Not what I hoped for

Decent storyline, hard to follow at times; certain parts could have been expanded on to make it much better such as the case with the boy Augustin, likely more impactful on the society of it's own time.

staggering detail

A wonderful but an exhausting book to read. Thank goodness the audible reader/actor was was quite brilliant and more than up to the task. Thank you.

perfection

elegant and luscious can't imagine a better rendering of this work of sour luxury

Great novel

Very funny black comedy. Really enjoyed it. Excellent reader.

Hard to imagine a novel with one above-the-title character being ambitious, but A Rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans is ferociously ambitious.

It is also ferociously funny. Jean Des Esseintes, the last excretion of an exhausted noble family, decides to turn his back on society and spend the rest of his life in refined aesthetic self-distraction, isolated far from his old haunts of Parisian debauchery.

Each chapter is an acidic thumbnail of his ambitions and what comes of them: interior decoration, a homemade liquor organ, the pet tortoise, his book collecting habits. He recalls fondly some old escapades with a woman trappeze artist and a female ventriloquist, neither of whom could fulfill desires, no matter how carefully he spelled them out.

His dining room is remodeled into a ship's galley, with authentic fixtures and window art. Tired of the materiality of the country, he orders imitation flowers, gets rid of them and imports exotic species that look like raw meat from an anatomy class. (Perhaps this suggested the carnivorous garden plants on TV's "The Addams Family"?)

When Des Esseintes decides to make his own scent, he nearly ashyxiates himself.

Then it's off to London to savor the Dickensian atmosphere he has been reading about when not studying lithographs of flayed Christian martyrs. Except he only makes it to an English bodega in Paris, then decides physical journeys aren't worth it. So he goes home.

Goes home and quickly binds up his digestive system with quack snake-oil remedies. A local doctor prescribes three enemas a day, which turns out for Des Esseintes to be a sublime aesthetic experience. He decides to create an enema menu from which to order his meals.

Sadly for him and the reader, his local doctor makes him go back to Paris. Prescription: rejoin the human race before you outsmart yourself to death!

A Rebours is a very funny novel. Anyone who ever daydreamed about being able to afford to just stay home will appreciate its macabre and lugubrious drollery.

An excellent reading of the Decadent classic

I had previously read Á Rebours some years ago, and picked up this audio as a refresher for a project I'm working on. The novel retains all of the unsettling force I remembered. The translation used is very subtle, and Mr. Boulton's reading is fluent, precise, and artful, without showiness or excessive flourish.

Good performance

Nice performance of the Havelock Ellis translation. I would like to see more Nicholas Boulton performances of classical works. He has that kind of voice that is commensurate with British works of the nineteenth century.