Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, he exclaims, 'alone was in the right' with his philosophy of pessimism, and Des Esseintes connects Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook with the resignation of The Imitation of Christ, a fifteenth-century Christian devotional work by Thomas à Kempis. Europeans Are Kinky: Apart from some major-league womanising in his younger days, which ultimately bored him and turned him towards an aesthetic lifestyle, des Esseintes at one point seduces a female circus acrobat and also a woman who turns him on by using her skills as a professional ventriloquist to pretend that her husband is about to break in on them. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

I think what I enjoyed the most, however, was reading the letter by Huysman himself twenty year later.Fun fact: In Real Life, Huysmans was a civil servant and worked for the French Interior Ministry, on whose stationery he wrote his novels. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The main character is an older, somewhat wealthy gentlemen who is so fed up with his meaningless lifestyle that he goes into complete seclusion in the countryside. He [Baudelaire] had revealed the morbid psychology of a mind that has reached the autumn of its experiences, had described the symptoms of a soul conscripted by suffering and licensed by spleen, had exposed the growing decay of feeling after the enthusiasm and belief of youth have evaporated .

To be fair to des Esseintes, he falls at the aesthetic, "surround myself with gorgeous objects" end of the spectrum. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes.Licentious and mystical obsessions mingled confusedly, haunting his brain…a stubborn desire to escape the vulgarities of the world and to plunge, far from the venerated customs of the past, into original ecstasies, in raptures that were either celestial or infernal. because they seemed neither submissive or tame enough; when it came to it all the Church wanted was soldiers who didn’t think for themselves…mediocrities. From what I’ve read of his letters, he seemed to be constantly dissatisfied with how people perceived him and his work. During the trial, Wilde's affinity for Huysmans's A Rebours is brought as evidence against his character. each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewellery, perfumes, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant.

Nature has had her day…there’s not a single one of her inventions…that human ingenuity cannot create; no forest…no moonlight that some theatrical scenery flooded with electric light cannot reproduce; no waterfall that hydraulics cannot imitate to perfection; no rock that papier mache cannot be made to look like; no flower that specious taffetas and delicately painted papers cannot equal…the moment has come when it’s a case of replacing her, wherever it’s possible to do so, by artifice.He claimed no cures, offered the sick no compensation, no hope; but when all was said and done, his theory of Pessimism was the great comforter of superior minds and lofty souls; it revealed society as it was, insisted on the innate stupidity of women, pointed out the pitfalls of life, saved you from disillusionment by teaching you to expect as little as possible, to expect nothing at all if you were sufficiently strong-willed, indeed, to consider yourself lucky if you were not constantly visited by some unforeseen calamity" (Huysmans 2003, p.

The main focus of the play was the dance, in which seven silk scarves work as extensions of the performers body. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking.