motionless adventure

Last scion of a noble family fallen into disrepair by dint of inbreeding, Jean des Esseintes is languishing life. At thirty, he was already bored of everything. His contemporaries bored. Stupidity and vulgarity of ail. World events leave him indifferent. On the haughty temperament exacerbated by an acute intelligence, he suffers to live in a society that considers poor and detestable. Even the carnal pleasures not have on him any appeal. Las human cesspool, but can not bring himself to commit suicide to escape him, he has only one desire: to withdraw, as well as in a cloister, in some distant thébaïde to savor the intense joys of seclusion, away from turpitude of his century. Throwing his sights on an isolated house of Fontenay-aux-Roses, so he installs it and with a maniacal care, begins to arrange it according to taste into a refined cocoon, a bubble with a delicate and rare place, conducive to study and meditation ...

Ah, the romance surprenantissime this is! Released in 1884, that's saying that Huysmans threw all his genius, his art, his whole creative intelligence! But is it really a novel? you say. For, this is a plot less romantic! There is nothing going on in these pages or so. No episode breathless. No dramatic progression. No bouncing breathtaking. Nothing that a man refusing the world and creating another ideal, the size of a simple house. Well yes, it is true that this novel is static. Everything happens in one place, almost. Everything is concentrated around a single character. But what a place! What a character! And what prose than Huysmans to put us in the scene either!

Ah, we never saw grow from the pen of a novelist most wonderfully contoured sentences than those that singular glad we still adventure? Decadent, misanthropic, misogynist, anti-social, anarchist, elitist: whatever the epithet that fits into this book, it is primarily an extraordinary stylistic feat, a feat such that it is not over four or five in all of French literature. From the first to the last page, this masterpiece oozes genius by each word, each of the commas. There are certain phrases novels capsize you with their beauty, their music, their inner harmony. In it, every sentence is a pure diamond crafted with love and precision. Mallarmé himself was impressed, say it! Oh, nothing but the Chapter 11, my friends ... What gem of style and humor! These pages that tell us an imaginary trip to London are among the tastiest ever written in our language ...

But there he was, you might say, part self-portrait in this mysterious and capricious Des Esseintes? Well, it is more than likely. No doubt we should see in this enigmatic character a fictional extrapolation Huysmans! In any case, this dandy hermit self-immured in its aesthetic Ivory Tower is probably the most amazing legitimately antihero and continues to exercise, despite the passage of time, the same disorder fascination. Brief but extremely dense, ascetic in his lush but about its shape, this book is more than a novel: it is a long prose poem. It intrigues and baffles. It seduces and enchants. It does not lower the level of the player. It's the reader, if he wants to taste the rare charms, to rise to its altitude. But who manages to enter into the mystery of this unique work, ah, what intoxicating reward!