Against Nature: A Novel
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A celebration of deviance, vanity, sensual abandon, and the aesthetics of artifice, Against Nature brings us the nineteenth-century rebel Jean Des Esseintes—disaffected, degenerate, and art obsessed. The last of a proud and noble family, Des Esseintes retreats from the world in disgust at bourgeois society and leads a life based on cultivation of the senses through art. He distills perfumes from the rarest oils and essences, creates a garden of poisonous flowers, sets gemstones in a tortoise’s gold-painted shell, and plans to corrupt a street urchin until he is degraded enough to commit murder. Des Esseintes’s groundbreaking aesthetic pilgrimage in Against Nature has served as the guidebook to decadence for more than a century, inspiring writers from Oscar Wilde to Michel Houellebecq.
A pioneer whose early work took inspiration from Baudelaire and Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans was a founder of the nineteenth-century decadent movement. Against Nature has influenced countless writers and artists and enjoys a cult following to this day. This new translation by Theo Cuffe, with a foreword by Lucy Sante, captures the magnificence of Huysmans’s famous style—filled with wit and irony, expressiveness and precision, erudition and sensuality.
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Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) was a French novelist and art critic who was one of the founders of the decadent movement in France. His most famous work, Against Nature (A rebours), was a seminal novel of this movement. He also wrote novels in the naturalist tradition of Émile Zola—including Marthe, Histoire d’une fille; Les soeurs Vatard; and En menage—and poetry inspired by Baudelaire’s work.
Theo Cuffe is known for his translations of classic French literature, including Voltaire’s Candide and Micromégas and Other Short Fictions.
Lucy Sante is a writer, critic, translator, and artist. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Her books include Low Life and The Other Paris. Originally from Belgium, she now lives in New York and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
