Many critics were appalled by its apparent lack of morality, while young Dandies and Aesthetes were attracted to it for its idolisation of art and sensation. Includes Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's review of À rebours from Le Constitutionnel, 28 July 1884, in appendix. This is a remarkably smart copy, notably uncommon in such good condition and in the rare dust jacket. E quindi, si ritira, “via dalla pazza folla”, va a vivere in una magione agreste che diventa il suo eremo (compagnia della servitù a parte), e che man mano trasforma secondo i suoi canoni estetici.

For while Proust is gorgeous and light and understanding of almost every nuance of the human condition, Huysmans is, well. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming . He discussed the iconography of Christian architecture at length in La cathédrale (1898), set at Chartres and with its cathedral as the focus of the book. Referring to society early on as "frightful clodhoppers", this would become the one and only time I laughed, because even though the overall mood is charming and elegant, there is also a lingering sadness for the solitude Des Esseintes chooses.Les Églises de Paris Archived 2006-12-06 at the Wayback Machine, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions de Paris, 2005. A Parisian aristocrat, immensely rich, neurotic, and reclusive, despises bourgeois society and dedicates his life to satisfying his aesthetic passions.

His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), which were strongly influenced by Baudelaire. For 32 years, Huysmans worked as a civil servant for the French Ministry of the Interior, a job he found tedious. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siècle imagination. Or he may have spurned the work that occupies itself with trivial mundanities and contains not the slightest hint of elevated passions or feverish splendor. Or did I just read the passages about the "perfume organ" and the jewel encrusted turtle and later assumed I had read the rest?The idea of advertisement is to plant in your brain things you don’t realize are there, but which change the way you think. Critical reviews by Léon Bloy of À rebours, En rade, and Là-bas published contemporaneously, in various journals or reviews, as Huysmans's novels came out over the years, in 1884, 1887, 1891, can be found, collected together and published 6 years after Huysmans's death, in book form, in On Huysmans' Tomb. They turn the thinker into a self-prejudiced creature who is no longer willing to think or change, who has been so embroiled in the frustrating stupidity that surrounds him that it stops him in his tracks. In one famous scene Des Esseintes is well on his way to visit London when after thinking over the plan in his mind he decides that in his mind he has already read and imagined so much of Britain's capital that he can only be disappointed by traveling there.