lori85 's review for:

Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans

3.0

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"After the aristocracy of birth, it was now the turn of the aristocracy of money; it was the Caliphate of the county-house, the despotism of the Rue du Sentier, the tyranny of commerce with its narrow-minded, venal ideas, its ostentatious and rascally instincts." So rails this book towards the end, along with the requisite French potshot at the United States for being so crass and lacking in real culture and ruining everyone else. The intellectual and aesthetic meanderings of nascent Slaanesh devotee Des Esseintes are linked primarily by a contemptuous elitism that believes beauty and mysticism are the exclusive property of the ancient and wealthy, now endangered by the leveling effect of the Industrial Revolution. A true hipster, Des Esseintes immediately loses interest in something he had loved once it becomes popular with the unwashed masses. He seems less a deep, edgy thinker than simply a future old man yelling at clouds. Huysmans's unabashed indulgence in purple prose is nevertheless quite a pleasure to read.