6 h 42 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · 165 pagesHardcover · 6 × 9 in · 165 pagesAbout this book
What if you shut out the world and tried to live on beauty alone?
Jean Floressas des Esseintes, the sickly last heir of an old noble family, leaves Paris to build a private world of exquisite tastes. In Against the Grain, Joris-Karl Huysmans follows him through rooms arranged for lamplight, shelves of chosen books, rare flowers and carefully composed scents. Artifice promises what ordinary life cannot give.
With almost no plot, this strange, often funny novel lets each obsession take the lead. Des Esseintes turns away from an age of factories and money toward paintings, Latin writers and sensations he can control. Yet a life devoted to the senses and the mind cannot silence the body—or settle the troubling question of faith.
What you’ll discover
- A house shaped by taste Enter rooms whose colors answer to lamplight and whose details serve one man's exacting desires.
- Beauty beyond nature Explore rare flowers and Moreau's Salome paintings through a mind drawn to cruel, unreachable beauty.
- A library of obsessions Follow his love of late Latin writers into the literary tastes of Decadence.
- Experiments in sensation Discover perfumes and a cabinet of liqueurs that turn private pleasure into an elaborate art.
- The cost of retreat Feel the strain between a dream of perfect independence and the needs that resist it.
Who will love it
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.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A last heir runs from Paris
- The house as a work of art
- Books, Latin and the poets he loves
- Paintings, flowers and the pleasure of the artificial
- Perfume, liqueurs and memories of past loves
- What the book is really about, and how it is told
Who’s who
- Jean Floressas des EsseintesThe sickly last heir of an old noble family, he flees Paris to live only by his refined tastes.
- The old servantsA devoted elderly couple who keep the house running quietly, speak little, and let their master live as he wishes.
- Miss UraniaAn American acrobat from his past, whose strength and manner fascinate him for a time.
- Auguste LangloisA young man whom Des Esseintes tries to shape through an experiment in corruption.
- The doctorThe physician who sees how badly the retreat has harmed Des Esseintes and urges a change.
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Against the Grain
by Joris-Karl Huysmans · 1884
Des Esseintes leaves Paris to build a world of art, books and scents, putting his body and soul at stake.
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
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.
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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.
The author
Joris-Karl Huysmans
1848–1907 · French novelist and art critic
Joris-Karl Huysmans was a French novelist of the Decadent movement who began in Zola's naturalist circle before turning toward mysticism and, ultimately, Catholicism. Là-bas, his unsettling exploration of Satanism in nineteenth-century Paris, is interwoven with the story of the medieval knight Gilles de Rais.
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