Against Nature: A New Translation of 'a Rebours' (Penguin Classics)

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We conflate Coca Cola with comfort and familiarity, the Nike swoosh with athletic ability, Mickey Mouse with childhood; our idea of how relationships work is based on yoghurt commercials. Don't we all wish we could be like that ancient soul, and just "seize the day, leaving to tomorrow its own cares? The book's plot is said to have dominated the action of Dorian, causing him to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism. The narrative centers on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete.

It is not like reading a treatise of William Morris' and coming to understand a particular aesthetic of how a book should be bound and why--it is a mere litany of excess, the dull and trashy kind of overspending which marks the parvenu. In La cathédrale (1898), the protagonist is at Chartres, intensely studying the cathedral and its symbolism. Nature, he used to say, has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes.Huysmans decided to keep certain features of the Naturalist style, such as its use of minutely documented realistic detail, but apply them instead to a portrait of an exceptional individual: the protagonist Jean des Esseintes.

However, when they met in July, Zola told Huysmans that the book had been a "terrible blow to Naturalism" and accused him of "leading the school astray" and "burning [his] boats with such a book", claiming that "no type of literature was possible in this genre, exhausted by a single volume".

In a letter of November 1882, Huysmans told Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy". In one famous scene Des Esseintes is well on his way to visit London when after thinking over the plan in his mind he decides that in his mind he has already read and imagined so much of Britain's capital that he can only be disappointed by traveling there.

That’s always been the problem, though, way back to the Dadaists: if you are obsessed with rejecting mainstream culture, that means you have to follow mainstream culture closely enough to know what it is doing, so you can then reject it. I don’t know intentionally or not but Against Nature is an absolute opposite of Walden by Henry David Thoreau and it is a complete denial of nature. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. It was a pile of Gothic trappings whose sheer weight broke through the roof of the old church to lay all in a shambles on the floor. Söylediği gibi doğa gününü doldurmuştu artık, görünümlerinin ve göklerinin tiksindirici tekbiçimliği nedeniyle incelmiş dikkatli sabrını kesinlikle tüketmişti.From what I’ve read of his letters, he seemed to be constantly dissatisfied with how people perceived him and his work. A Parisian aristocrat, immensely rich, neurotic, and reclusive, despises bourgeois society and dedicates his life to satisfying his aesthetic passions. It scarcely admitted—in theory at least—any exceptions to the rule; thus it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.