Eventually, his late nights and idiosyncratic diet take their toll on his health, requiring him to return to Paris or to forfeit his life. In the last lines of the book, he compares his return to human society to that of a non-believer trying to embrace religion. The parallels between the two books end there since Huysmans takes his character in quite a different direction to the one Stevenson chose for the finally repentant Doctor Jekyll. Des Esseintes is destined to climb as high as he had previously descended and to explore the mystical side of his nature, hand in hand with his author. The language all this is described in is deliberately rich and unnaturalistic. Huysmans’s basic approach is outlined when des Esseintes explains the kind of writing he admires among Latin authors – full of That’s how culture gets to you: it surrounds you all the time, trying to make you into a copy of itself, and you and everyone in that culture are a part of that system. We shame other people, we guilt them, we tease them, we make suggestions, we tell them little infectious phrases that are supposed to be helpful. Look over the comments on Goodreads some time and you’ll see it at work: people trying to shut up dissent, repeating mantras and plugging their ears, and who clearly think that insulting and belittling people is the same as discussion. But why shouldn’t they? It’s how they were socialized. Esseintes is an ascetic of art, and ends up sacrificing his life by metamorphose it into a work of art, his masochistic devotion draws him to the brink of alienation, intensifying his neurosis.

I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time ... though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean. [6] Ogni capitolo diventa occasione per riassumere particolari argomenti del passato, dall’arte delle gemme, dei profumi, dei fiori, di musica, canto, eccetera. Yet, ironically, he also complains about how there is 'nothing genuine' left in the world, how it is all artificial (for which he decries it) despite the fact that he spends the rest of his time trying to live in another artificial world of his own making. Clearly, artificiality is neither the problem nor the solution, but a mere cover-up for the real issues. In this context of permanent chiseling, Esseintes can only be physically displayed with the same obsession for refinement. Certainly, there are some interesting scenes within the book--the famous tortoise episode actually achieving some real insight (and satire), but overall, the book is terribly dull--a piling on of detail upon detail without much central notion to hang them on. Some might argue that the theme is the gross emptiness of decadence, but I don't think the work's scattered repetition does very much to explore it.For starters, it is an accomplished work of realism that turns realism on its head. Huysman--just as effectively as the Goncourts or Dreiser--knows how to accumulate a wealth of detail to convey the physical reality of the situation he wishes to describe. Just because he's describing the fantastically decorated and furnished apartment of an extremely wealthy aesthete concerned with pleasing no one but himself is irrelevant to this particular aspect of the "novel." Perché prima, andare e essere controcorrente era considerato cosa buona e giusta. Era considerato fico. François, the novel’s protagonist, considers Huysmans his B.F.F. “Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him,” François tells us, in the book’s opening line. He is an academic who specializes in Huysmans; other than his favorite author, he has no close relationships at all. He’s so distant from his parents that they only enter his thoughts at their deaths; he attends neither of their funerals. One of the more curious threads in the book is the effect which his religious education has had on him: though it has not made him a faithful man, it has inspired him to reject man and the world as worthless and flawed, and to instead spend his time living for another world, a false world which exists only in his mind.

Blunt, Hugh F. (1921). "J.K. Huysmans." In: Great Penitents. New York: The Macmillan Company, pp.169–193.

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Sanırım adı geçen tüm o klasik eserlerin hatırına beğeni yıldızıma bir tane de onları için ekliyorum. Only, Huysmans leaves us with a scintilla of doubt as to whether these very books are not the cure, but a cause, of Des E's dissolute condition. Gustave Moreau: Salomè danza davanti a Erode. 1876, Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Collection, Los Angeles. nowadays, nothing genuine exists, since the wine one drinks and the liberty one boldly proclaims are laughable and a sham...For what could [I] hope, if not new disillusionments...? In the 1903 preface, Huysmans writes that he would have included Rimbaud and Laforgue had he known their work at the time.

purified verb extracts, nouns that reek of incense, bizarre adjectives rough-hewn from gold, with the barbaric, charming appeal of Gothic jewels….] Highet, Gilbert (1957). "The Decadent." In: Talents and Geniuses. New York: Oxford University Press, pp.92–99.

Cyber incident

The hero of this book, Jean des Esseintes, is the last of a line of distinguished aristocrats. The opening scene describes the portraits that still hang at the family ancestral seat, the Chateau de Lourps; the ancestors were all solid, well-built specimens, portrayed at the peak of their health and vigour. All except one. That ancient portrait revealed a very decadent looking individual with a sly, vulpine look on his narrow face (the name Lourps is close to the word for wolves in French: loups). When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books - that [Leo Tolstoy] crap. People shouldn't read that stuff. When we read those books, what purpose does it serve in this day and time?" - Mike Tyson This promiscuity of admiration was one of the most distressing things in his life. Incomprehensible successes had permanently ruined books and paintings for him which he had previously held dear; faced with widespread public approbation, he ended up discovering imperceptible flaws in works, and rejecting them….]

Yet, as in many cases of mental illness, recovery comes at the cost of authenticity and individualism: Sembra la madre di tutte le frasi di lancio, il re di tutti i blurb, su me ha fatto presa rapida e duratura come nessun’altra. Houellebecq considers himself “someone who believes in unlimited happiness, which is eternal and possible right away,” yet he writes books that are so depressing they belong to a movement called déprimisme (“depressionism”). Then again, he’s as unreliable as his latest narrator, François. Houellebecq told some journalists that “Submission” is satire; he informed others that it is not. In 2010, he told The Paris Review that he believes in the existence of a soul while simultaneously refusing to accept “a truth beyond science.” And now he’s found agnosticism.Meyers, Jeffrey (1975). "Gustave Moreau and Against Nature." In: Painting and the Novel. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 84–95. While he slowly drifted away from the Naturalists, Huysmans won new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in his novel. Stéphane Mallarmé responded with the tribute "Prose pour Des Esseintes", published in La Revue indépendante on January 1, 1885. This famous poem has been described as "perhaps the most enigmatic of Mallarmé's works". [17] The opening stanza gives some of its flavour: Lloyd, Christopher (1988). "French Naturalism and the Monstrous: J.-K. Huysmans and A Rebours," Durham University Journal, Vol. 81 (1), pp. 111–121. Hyacinth" (yellow varieties of zircon) was probably intended as jacinth, a red variety drawing its name from the same type of flower. Compostelle is the capital of Galicia, a self-governing province in northwest Spain. Green beryl is simply emerald, though "glaucous" implies an unusual yellow-green color. "Balas ruby" refers not to a ruby but to a red spinel, a less precious stone, and the details of a Sudermanian ruby are mysterious. — Paul O'Leary McCann Wilde, Oscar. (1998). The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray. Oxford World's Classics. ISBN 0192833650.