Against Nature
Kindle Edition
Start Publishing LLC · Ebook · March 25, 2013
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- Who it’s for
- A novel of cultivated retreat, where a catalogue of tastes takes the place of conventional action.
- Genres
- The Classics, Literary Fiction, Psychological Fiction
- Published
- Start Publishing LLC, March 25, 2013
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Start with this bookAbout this book
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans is a novel in which very little happens; its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. Against Nature contains many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic.
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In doing so, it broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of decadent literature. Jean Des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris which has left him disgusted with human society. Without telling anyone, he absconds to a house in the countryside. He fills the house with his eclectic art collection and decides to spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. Throughout his intellectual experiments, he recalls various debauched events and love affairs of his past in Paris.
The Art of Retreat
A novel of cultivated retreat, where a catalogue of tastes takes the place of conventional action.
Come here for
- An inward portrait shaped by a recluse’s tastes and artistic obsessions
- A classic that turns aesthetic contemplation into its main event
Expect
- A close focus on one eccentric antihero’s inner life
- Decadence, Symbolist themes, and memories of Parisian excess
Where it sits
| Literary Fiction | 74% |
|---|---|
| The Classics | 68% |
| Psychological Fiction | 47% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- The Classics
- Literary Fiction
- Psychological Fiction
- Authors
- Joris-Karl Huysmans
- Publisher
- Start Publishing LLC
- Published
- March 25, 2013
- Format
- Ebook
- Reading lane
- The Classics