Monday 7 May 2012

A  most interesting and highly entertaining read this A Rebours, Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans, new translation by Margaret Mauldon. Definitely one to return to!


The anti-hero, hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete character, Des Esseintes, contemplates nature accordingly, 

'Nature has had her day; she has finlly exhausted, through the nauseating uniformity of her landscapes and her skies, the sedulous patience of men of refined taste....what small-mindedness, like a shopkeeper who stocks only this one article to the exclusion of any other; what monotony she exhibits with her stores of meadows and trees, what banality with her arrangements of mountains and seas!'


'There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artifice.' (2009:20)


Oxford World's Classics

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