Against Nature

A disillusioned aristocrat retreats from ordinary life into a private world of artifice, sensation, luxury, and decay. Jean des Esseintes, the last descendant of a worn-out noble family, abandons society for an isolated house outside Paris, where he tries to replace the vulgarity of the modern world with carefully arranged pleasures: rare books, exotic perfumes, jeweled objects, strange flowers, decadent art, religious memory, and increasingly unnatural refinements of taste.J.-K. Huysmans's Against Nature is one of the defining novels of French Decadence and fin-de-siècle literature. Almost plotless by design, the book follows the movements of a mind rather than the events of an outward adventure, turning des Esseintes's obsessions into a catalog of aesthetic revolt, spiritual exhaustion, nervous illness, and cultural disgust. Its influence on modern literature was immense, and it became closely associated with the world of aestheticism, Symbolism, and the decadent imagination that later shaped writers such as Oscar Wilde.Strange, brilliant, perverse, funny, and unsettling, Against Nature remains essential reading for those interested in French literature, psychological fiction, literary decadence, modernism's origins, and the uneasy border between art and sickness. It is a novel about escape that cannot escape the self, a portrait of taste pushed so far beyond nature that it becomes a form of imprisonment.