Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Against the Grain
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love ideas, art and language, and anyone curious about the roots of Decadence and Symbolism. Rare books, paintings and perfumes fill this strange, funny portrait of a private world.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
Against the Grain is a short French novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, published in 1884 under the title À rebours. Huysmans had been writing in the realist manner of Émile Zola. Here he broke away and wrote a book with almost no plot. One man shuts himself in a house and builds a world out of art, books, scents and rare flowers.
That man is Jean Floressas des Esseintes, the tired last heir of an old noble family. Each chapter takes up one of his obsessions and follows it through. You get a tour of the tastes of the Decadent movement: its paintings, its poets, its hothouse plants and its disgust with the age of factories and money. The book is also funny, strange and often moving. Let us start with the man himself and the house he leaves Paris to build.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1A last heir runs from ParisFree
- 2The house as a work of art
- 3Books, Latin and the poets he loves
- 4Paintings, flowers and the pleasure of the artificial
- 5Perfume, liqueurs and memories of past loves
- 6What the book is really about, and how it is told
Punkt 1 von 6
A last heir runs from Paris
The novel opens with a short portrait of the family. The Floressas des Esseintes line was once large and vigorous. Over the centuries it has thinned through marriage within a small circle, and the portraits in the old château show men who grow paler and weaker with each generation. Jean, the last of them, is a thin and nervous man in his thirties, with poor health and sharp tastes.
He has a childhood behind him with the Jesuits, who taught him well but could not make him believe as they did. As a young man he spent money and sought pleasure in Paris society. He tried the aristocrats of his own class and found them dull and narrow. He tried the literary crowd and found them petty. Women and private parties left him just as bored.
So he makes a plan. He sells most of what he owns and buys a house at Fontenay-aux-Roses, on the edge of Paris but far enough from its noise. He wants to be near enough to the city to be safe and far enough to hear nothing of it. He wants a refuge, as he says to himself, built on the sea of human stupidity.
The move sets the rule of the whole book. Des Esseintes will not fight the world he despises. He will turn his back on it and make a better one. Everything that follows is the building and the testing of that private world, and we should ask along the way whether such a world can hold a person.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
- Nothing to pay today · Renews every year
- We email you before you pay
- Cancel online in two clicks
Questions about Against the Grain
What is Against the Grain about?
It follows a rich, sickly aristocrat named Des Esseintes who leaves Paris to live in a house of his own design, indulging his taste for rare books, art, flowers and scents, with little outward action.
What does the title Against the Grain mean?
The French title À rebours means going against the grain, or backward. It points to a hero who does the opposite of what society and nature expect, and who prefers the artificial to the natural.
Is Against the Grain hard to read?
The vocabulary is rich, and the chapters are more like essays than scenes. It is short and often funny, so many readers find it rewarding.
When was Against the Grain written and why does it matter?
It was published in 1884. It marked a break from realism and became a key book of the Decadent movement, influencing later writers such as Oscar Wilde, who echoed it in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Who is Des Esseintes?
He is the main figure of the novel, the last member of an old noble family. Weak in health and bored with society, he tries to build a perfect private world and finds it has a heavy price.