Against Nature (A Rebours) (Penguin Classics)

I'll assume that you already know about this book, or can get what you need from the other reviews. I'm just focusing on the edition: the 2004 Penguin Classics reprint of Robert Baldick's 1956 translation but with a new introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness (and a new cover, of which more anon).

Now, I think of myself as a Huysmans 'completist,' and would have thought that I have a copy of just about every edition. But I've never seen this one in a bookstore (even here in NYC) and only came across it by accident on Amazon. As other reviewers have noted, the translation, though older, is much more readable than the Oxford Classics one. The latter has far more annotation, especially for the surveys of Latin and French "decadent" literature, but you really don't need that for more than your first reading. This is the edition to get if you plan to revisit the work from time to time, as I did (and do).

Why else? Well, the Oxford edtion is printed on cheap, thin paper that browned almost immediately, and produces irritating "see-through" effects; the cover, of my copy at least, instantly creased itself rather than folding, making it hard to hold (and ugly). This Penguin is on bright, white paper, and with larger type (though consequently is also a bit larger in size). Des Esseintes would approve!

But the main reasons are two: the intro, and the cover. McGuinness does a much better, or at least more interesting, job of relating the book to its time and ours, bringing in far more interesting tie-ins (Breton's "black 'umour" rather than "Huysmans's anality", Marianne Faithful saying she'd only bed guys who read the book, rather than Oxford's cringe-inducing comparison to Kurt Cobain(!)), though unlike Terry Hale in his introduction to the Penguin La Bas, he doesn't pick up on the fact that Huysmans' job at the "Interior Ministry" was actually comparable to our Dept. of Homeland Security rather than the traffic bureau.

But it was the cover that first led me to notice this on Amazon. It's a wonderful portrait by Franz Kupka (not Kafka!), "The Yellow Scale," which depicts an amazingly burnt out aesthetic type, wrapped up in a yellow robe, yellow book (of course) in one hand, and cigarette burning out in his other limp, yellow hand. Against the rest of the regulation black Penguin Classics cover, it's quite striking, and far more original than the old cover, Whistler's portrait of Montesquiou, or Oxford's Salome.

(While McGuinness's intro makes a good case for "Against the Grain" as a better title, beware of the Dover edtion under that name: it's old and expurgated, as is the illustrated one from the '30s). Buyer beware!)

In short, this is the one to get for the true Huysmaniac!

Huysmans’ great A Rebour (perhaps better translated Against the Grain), is a mordantly brilliant plunge into the depths of modern decadence. With focused humor and sardonic sense of taste, Huysmans’s unfolds the story of Des Essaintes, the hermetic aristocrat on the borders of Paris, as he tries to seal himself in aesthetic rituals. Sliding vertiginously between the beautiful and divine, Against Nature is a brilliant defense of artifice and cultural alchemy.

There is nothing like the experience of "A Rebours"--- simply make sure though to read the Robert Baldick translation. If you've endured the terseness of Raymond Carver and his laconic spawn then dive into the effusive yet tempered ornamentation of Huysmans-- the man was a master.

There is a scene in one of the last episodes of "Frasier" where the character of Frasier is threatened with a lawsuit. He begins to embrace his sofa and coffee table, sobbing: "My things! My beautiful, beautiful things!"

"A Rebours" is a novel about a Frasier Crane type carried to psychopathic extremes. Des Esseintes locks himself into a smart villa in Fontaney, devoting his entire life to the most extreme refinements of aesthetic experience. He insists on having customised copies of all his favourite books printed on handmade paper and bound in unusual grey-and-brown parchment covers. He only really likes one artist, Gustave Moreau, whom he regards as the most refined depictor of decadence in history.

He has seemingly boundless ability to find extra layers of refinement in everything, whether it is alcohol, perfume or food. At one stage he waxes lyrical as he admires the comfortable appearance of a bottle of Benedictine liqueur, with its dark green squat body, its red sealing wax and its parchment cap (this amused me, because I have an identical bottle of Benedictine; I don't see what's so great).

Above all, Des Esseintes hates popular taste. If an artist or composer becomes popular amongst ordinary people, he freely admits that he instantly discovers some paltry flaw in the artist and moves on to a more obscure one.

"A Rebours" is a very funny satire of the extreme, neurotic limits of aesthetic taste. It is also a satire of the fate of the French aristocracy at the fin de siecle, a period when the aristocracy was increasingly obsolete. Actual wealth was concentrating in the burgeoning middle classes, and all the aristocracy had left was their "refinement!"

Very intriguing and thought-provoking, but extremely strange. This book doesn't seem to have a point or an over-all message; it mostly combines the physical life of a rich and lonely Frenchman with his severely deranged mental life. I'd mostly recommend reading it just to experience the interesting strangeness of this single-character novel.

It's hard to believe that a "novel", if that is what you want to call this book, in which essentially nothing happens, can be so fascinating. The novel centers around a reclusive, hyper-sensitive man who retreats to a mansion in the country-side where he can be alone with his books, his paintings and his thoughts. While light on plot, the rambling meditations of the book's only character are so bizarre and neurotic that you can't help but being sucked in by his misanthropic commentaries on art, literature, religion, nature, love and humanity. He is the ultimate snob, the ultimate dandy, too good for everything and everyone; yet Huysmans' character is, at times, sympathetic when he isn't repulsive. Depending on your mood and personality, you may either envy or despise the artificial/cerebral world he creates.

Be warned though, you need to be pretty well-read in the humanities to appreciate this book. But if you are patient and can understand the allusions Huysmans makes, I think you will appreciate this work. If nothing else, this book comes highly recommended just for it's sheer originality.

Huysmans's work is over long stretches quite a hilarious book, deriving its humor mainly from the length to which des Esseintes goes in his quest of the acme of refined taste. I think it can teach us some things, but not in the vein of direct emulation like the Oscar Wilde set preferred to do. I think it is clear that Huysmans does not advocate the decadent lifestyle as such -- des Esseintes is just as much ridiculed as everyone and everything else in the book, for example when he passes out on his window sill from a nonexistent frangipane odor.

Overrefinement is not the answer, but then again it seems to me that especially since the 1990s society has become decidedly under-refined: Taste has been outsourced, and people wear the clothes magazines tell them they should wear, buy the perfumes they see in the advertisements, choose their furniture either by what Target or their interior designer has given their stamp of approval, and eat the food that is praised in foodie magazines. Someone like des Esseintes who knows what he wants without someone (through advertising) telling him what he _should_ want is in many ways quite alien to our modern culture, which makes this book more relevant today.

Of course, thanks the Internet, this rigid consumer culture is somewhat macerated by higher availability of custom-tailored solutions at reasonable prices: For example, thanks to print-on-demand services it is quite possible today to have one's very own edition of a favorite book (provided it's out of copyright), just like des Esseintes had about 120 years ago. So in a way the pendulum seems to be swinging back into the other direction already, towards more customized products.

So if the reader of this novel comes away with the notion that he could be a bit more choosey about how he spends his time and money that would be a good thing I believe. Of course some of des Esseintes's refinements in the book, like the bejeweled turtle (mirrored in "[[ASIN:0316042994 Brideshead Revisited]]"), are monstrous and darkly funny. The movie "[[ASIN:B0011WMIEM La Grande Bouffe]]" also seems as if it might have been inspired by "À rebours," only that the decadence is taken even farther there to its deadly conclusion. And the "burial dinner" on the grounds of des Esseintes's temporarily lost potency turns up again in Altman's "[[ASIN:B000BZISTE M*A*S*H]]" movie.

I can't say much about this particular translation, as I have read the 1928 anonymous translation that is available for free on the Web on my [[ASIN:B000WPXQ2M PRS-505]]. Judging from the excerpt provided by Amazon for this version, the anonymous translation seems to be slightly superior (try reading it aloud and see which one sounds better) and a bit more musical in its cadence, but this 1958 translation is probably also satisfactory. Of course, if I were des Esseintes, I would now launch into a twenty-page reflection on translations of novels in general and specifically all the existing translations of "À rebours" and how they compare, but I think I will spare the reader that.

Perhaps it should be noted that the book is staunchly pro-Catholic, pro-Jesuit and anti-Protestant in its outlook (Huysmans later became a lay monk for two years) and constantly equates Christianity with Catholicism, as the Catholic Church is wont to do to this day. Then again, the ridiculously base behavior of des Esseintes is hardly good propaganda for the "superiority" of Roman Catholicism over Protestantism I would think.

Dooooope. One of those books that feels FRESH AF across time, I think of passages from this book all the time... it took me months to read all the way, I didn't realize how much it was resonating with me til after ... great at painting visual images with language!

Amazing -- everything about the Penguin edition is to be recommended. An extremely strong introduction, a valiant effort at translation by Baldick, and useful appendices containing both Huysmans's belated 1903 preface and a series of contemporary reviews. It would be foolish to attempt to say anything about the text itself -- simply transcendent.

"As a matter of fact, artifice was considered by Des Essenites to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature, he used to say, has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes."

I love Au Rebours...what an incredible book. Each chapter is utterly different, deals with entirely different material, and is so deep in learning that it astounds you. It's also hugely funny in its deeply pessimistic and despairing way.

One of the greatest books ever written.