Product Description

Resisting the traditional model of nineteenth-century fiction, Joris-Karl Huysman produced in 1884 a novel unlike any other of his time. Against Nature is the story of Des Esseintes, an aesthete who attempts to escape Paris and, along with it, the vulgarity of modern life. As Des Esseintes hides away in his museum of high taste, Huysman offers the reader a treasury of cultural delights and anticipates many aspects of twentieth century modernism. Supplemented by notes and a critical introduction, this new translation is sure to engage today's reader.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1003966 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

About the Author

Nicholas White is Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Customer Reviews

Damn right.
Against Nature utterly captivated me. Never before had I read a novel that dared throw any and all narrative convention to the winds with such mad abandon. Huysmans himself thought the public would have no interest in it, and to be perfectly honest, I can't for the life of me see why he wasn't absolutely correct. And yet, for some reason, I just couldn't get enough. Chapters that do nothing more than expound upon Des Esseintes's favorite painters or Latin writers amount to little more than reader abuse, but I found them endlessly fascinating regardless. No doubt part of this was nothing more than shocked delight at the sheer perversity of the little experiment, but I don't think my interest was entirely predicated on novelty--Huysmans is actually quite a good writer (I read the Penguin edition, as translated by Robert Baldick, for what its worth), and Des Esseintes's whims, desires, and recollections are often so extravagantly bizarre as to be quite funny. And then, of course, there's the 'plants' chapter, which is quite probably the most grotesque and macabre thing I've ever read. It's a bit of a shame that it's stuck right in the middle of the book, as it does make the subsequent material seem a bit anticlimactic, but then again, if Huysmans had any sort of regard for narrative structure, he wouldn't have written this diabolical piece of work in the first place. If Zola was Pink Floyd, Huysmans was the Sex Pistols. You need to read Against Nature.

A poor substitute for Baldick's translation
Frankly, I wrote this commentary on Margaret Mauldon's translation of A Rebours to divert the buyer to a much better one, that is, the classic translation by Robert Baldick, also available from Amazon.com.
This new modernized translation is supposed to be truer to the french original text, but it is not so. It's thorny and crammed with clashing sentences and too many words. Take for instance the prologue,
"Cramped and confined within those old frames where their great shoulders stretched across from side to side..."
Now compare this with Baldick's version which is more to the point,
"Imprisoned in old picture-frames which were scarcely wide enough for their broad shoulders.."
It's also obvious that Baldick's translation is much truer to the musical language that Huysmans wrote his book in. In fact Baldick mentions it in his preface to the translation. His assesment of A Rebours is also valuable for the understanding of the author's accomplishment.
The only thing valuable in this poor substitute is the appendix which consists of Huysmans' preface to A Rebours written twenty years after the novel. But to compare Baldick's translation, written in the late fifties, with this grammatical scramble is like comparing a nightingale's song to a cricket's. I sincerely recommend you rather buy Baldick's translation over this one.

Best edition of decadent classic
Assuming that this "Viking" edition is in fact the Penguin edition or some relation, this is by far the preferred edition of Huysmans' strange masterwork. The translation by Robert Baldick, Huysmans' most trustworthy biographer, is not only NOT slightly censored like the earlier English one reprinted by Dover... it's also a much livelier read. Which is important because, after all, there's not much of a conventional plot here; the story such as it is depicts the gradual enervation of a decadent aristocrat as he exhausts the pleasure to be found in every pleasure he can think of.

Huysmans was literature's great complainer, capable of finding the misery and ennui in any situation-- even bachelorhood in late 19th century Paris. And while the book is regarded mainly as a manual for decadent living (Dorian Gray kept it by his bed), full of recherche and recondite indulgences, Huysmans' depiction of the unending quest for novelty and sensation is also drolly funny at times-- as in the scene in which an impotent des Esseintes takes up with a ventriloquist in the hopes that she can get a rise out of him by impersonating her own husband threatening violence outside the door while they copulate