Book description
The hero of this curious novel is des Esseintes, a neurasthenic
aristocrat who has turned his back on the vulgarity of modern life and
retreated to an isolated country villa. Here, accompanied only by a
couple of silent servants, he pursues his obsessions with exotic
flowers, rare gems, and complex perfumes and embarks on a series of
increasingly strange aesthetic experiments, starting with the decision
to give his giant pet tortoise a jewel-encrusted shell...
Born in Paris in 1848 and acknowledged as a principal architect of
the fin-de-si cle imagination, Joris-Karl Huysmans was a career civil
servant who wrote ten novels, most notably A Rebours (1884) and L -Bas
(1891). Huysmans died in 1907.
Robert Baldick (d. 1972) translated widely from the French and wrote
a biography of Huysmans.
Patrick McGuinness is a Fellow and Tutor in French at St Anne's
College, Oxford, and editor of Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de
Siecle (Exeter UP, 2000).
