A review by will___to___flower
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans

5.0

This is one of the most interesting a breathtakingly beautiful books ever scribed with a pen. To be honest, it’s not a novel, it’s a series of reflections by a character that exists within its own universe entirely; with his own thoughts that only exist within his world, and a taste in the arts that can only exist within this novel. What excites me most about this book is the lucid and magnificent imagery he sets forth when ascribing his own literary criticism to the likes of Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, etc... Des Esseintes has no time for the contents of a book anymore, only the psychology; the mind of the poet or scholar he reads. What he wants is to reach into the depths of the writers thoughts and extract the essence of the character that wrote the work that lay before him. And that is what makes this book so difficult to uncover, so indescribably intelligent and full of life, and yet so effortlessly able to evoke lifelessness. We are not reading a book about the story of a character, but a book about the musings of a character; only then is there a story or a semblance of forward. This book is a labyrinth where the exit leads to the entrance, there is no budge, no pull or conflict; only art and conscience.

This book does not make you love reading; it makes you resent it, but that is all the more better for the spiteful reader.