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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
À Rebours: Un Ménagerie de la Décadence....,
By Sébastien Melmoth (Hôtel d'Alsace, PARIS) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Against Nature: A Rebours (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
À Rebours: Un Ménagerie de la Décadence...* `[A] yellow book. . . . It was the strangest book he had ever read. It was a novel without a plot . . . a psychological study . . . [written] in that curious jewelled style . . . of the French school of Décadents. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as evil in colour. It was a poisonous book'--O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Virtually inaugurating the Fin de Siècle, native Parisian J.-K. Huysmans published his masterpiece of the Decadence, À Rebours (literally, `Backwards'), in 1884. Huysmans's ethos was deeply imbued with the effluvia of Poe, Baudelaire, and Gautier; of course his contemporaries were Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant, Balzac, les frères Goncourts, and Zola--(to cite the greater names). Huysmans was betimes a critic of art and society, a novelist of the Naturalist and Decadent schools, and ultimately a fervent mystic of the Ralliement--the resurgence of Romish occultism, superstition and obscurantism fomented by Vatican I of 1870. This trajectory of Huysmans's aesthetic evolution is chronologically obvious in his chief publications: 1874 - A Dish of Spices 1876 - Marthe: the Story of a Woman 1879 - The Vatard Sisters 1880 - Backpack 1880 - Parisian Sketches 1881 - Together 1882 - Downstream 1883 - Modern Art 1884 - Backwards 1887 - Stranded 1887 - A Dilemma 1889 - Some People 1891 - The Fallen 1895 - On the Way 1898 - The Cathedral 1901 - Saint Lydwine of Schiedam 1903 - The Oblate Of course English translations can only approximate Huysmans's opulent vocabulary, exquisitely tortured French syntax, caustic satirical critique, and extraordinarily perceptive descriptive abilities. À Rebours's narrative is extremely static, claustrophobic and ferocious à la Sade, although black humour and fumisterie are on tap as well (cf. the hilarious episode in Chapter IV of the visit to the dentist): in this, together with dream sequences, Huysmans adumbrates Surrealism. Basically À Rebours serves as a vehicle to list and annotate every fecund flavour, odour, colour, shape, texture, tone, form, and idea offered by every recherché author and artist that Huysmans's shrewd and extensive observation had ever encountered: a phenomenal text indeed. * The Fallen Downstream Marthe: the Story of a Woman On the Way The Oblate Parisian Sketches The Cathedral Stranded St Lydwine of Schiedam The Decadent Reader: Fiction from Fin-de-Siècle France * |
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Against Nature: A Rebours (Oxford World's Classics) by J. -K. Huysmans (Paperback - August 3, 2009)
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