Against Nature (Against the Grain)

By: Joris-Karl Huysmans

Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton

Against Nature was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884, it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society.

Des Esseintes, a minor aristocrat but a high intellectual - deeply cultured and well-read - can no longer bear contemporary Parisian life in any of its forms! As a youth he had experienced the monastic environment and later academic life, but, remaining unfulfilled, he immersed himself in the multifarious sensual pleasures so readily available in Paris.

Still deeply unsatisfied, he decides to move to a house in a village in the countryside. Here he can create his own controlled environment with a minutely designed interior supporting his particular artistic tastes. At last he can live alone with his books, his reflections, and his needs. Nothing will interfere with how he wants to live, what he wants to see, to read, to study, to smell, to eat. However, a life of such total personal indulgence, even on a lofty intellectual and artistically sensitive plane, proves anything but easy - or satisfying.

The character of Des Esseintes, intense, testing, infuriating, but astonishing, was said to have been influenced by the famous aesthete of the time, the Comte de Montesquiou (also a model for Baron de Charlus in Proust's In Search of Lost Time), while Against Nature makes an unmistakeable appearance in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nicholas Boulton here reads one of the best early translations (published anonymously and originally titled Against the Grain), which has been revised to reinstate sections originally cut to protect sensibilities of the time. It is the full novel as Huysmans intended.

Public Domain (P)2017 Ukemi Productions Ltd

Not what I hoped for

Decent storyline, hard to follow at times; certain parts could have been expanded on to make it much better such as the case with the boy Augustin, likely more impactful on the society of it's own time.

Un Libro Agrío que Contempla el Fin de una Era

Este libro es un fiel exponente del decadentismo europeo de a finales del siglo XIX y refleja, desde el punto de vista de un aristócrata, Des Esseintes, la crisis existencial y espiritual de una Europa que, ante su creciente liberalización, no sabe ya cuáles son sus valores, ni en qué se supone que debe creer. Es una crónica, a manera de monólogo, que describe las reflexiones de un «espiritu aristocrático» que se sabe moribundo ante una época en donde la igualación, la estandarización y lo común son el «zeitgeist»; el espíritu de los tiempos.

Por lo anterior, «A Contrapelo» es una exploración psicológica de la fatiga de quien, disgustado con los estándares de la era que le tocó vivir, se aisla y se resigna a complacerse con sensaciones estéticas y estimulaciones intelectuales dignas de otros tiempos. Esto, por supuesto, hasta que el peso de la realidad hace lo suyo e irrumpe con el escapismo del protagonista.

De fondo esta es una excelente obra y, en actuación,su narrador tiene una voz y diccion implecable en el inglés. Si una crítica puede alzarse a este libro es que, al tratarse de un monologo de un protagonista enclaustrado, la prosa puede llegar ser sumamente descriptiva y hacer alusión a muchas referencias artísticas, filosóficas y literarias que seguramente serán de provecho para cualquiera en las humanidades, pero que para un lector común puede caer como pesado o barroco.

obsession

a book that is beautiful and lush in description and perfectly portrays the feeling of obsession. it feels very much of its time and timeless at the sametime. was lost in the sauce at times but was very much worth the time

staggering detail

A wonderful but an exhausting book to read. Thank goodness the audible reader/actor was was quite brilliant and more than up to the task. Thank you.

Good performance

Nice performance of the Havelock Ellis translation. I would like to see more Nicholas Boulton performances of classical works. He has that kind of voice that is commensurate with British works of the nineteenth century.