A Rebours

or Against Nature; a new translation of A Rebours (Alternately translated as "Against the Grain") by JK Huysmans

Current price: $40.00

Ok, so this is hardly a book at all in that it has absolutely nothing in common with any other book you've ever read. Huysman was a kook and kind of brilliant at times. La-Bas was better. But this one, there's barely any story.

Des Esseintes, our hero, is the sickly scion of a dissipating landed family. Abandoning his youthful indulgences, he sets out to live the life of an aesthetic hermit, basically a collector of rare and refined sense-impressions. Aside from a few anecdotes of Des Esseintes' wild younger days, the book is a catalog of all the crazy weird shit he keeps in his weird little house in the suburbs of paris that he had built inside a larger house, so he would never have to hear his servants.

A strange, curious and sometimes challenging book- Huysmans spends long passages detailing for instance every book in Des Esseintes' library. This is the "little yellow volume" mentioned in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and the inspiration for Dorian's collection of jewels. So far I'm the only seller of this edition, marking it high for now.

The Cornelius Chronicles by Michael Moorcock

Selling Price: I'm not certain but I'm sure I lost $1.00 on the sale Is this the turning point?

As of last month it was over a year later and this project was still running itself nicely. Only making a couple of dollars a month but it was still nice to see the shipping notification show up in my inbox occasionally.

I think I read most of the first two Cornelius books. They're an interesting mix of Spi-Fi fantasizing and a typical New Wave SF fondness for ennui and curious stylistic experiments. Moorcock calls it a quartet instead of a quadrilogy: it's not one long story, it's the same story told four times with minor alterations. In the first one super spy Jerry Cornelius is albino, but in the second he's black. Also in each iteration reality seems to be falling apart more severely.

I read these quite a while ago, but Jerry is a space captain in the Moorcock book I'm reading by audiobook now, Doctor Who and the Coming of the Terraphiles, which strikes me as a bit pornographic now that I've typed it out. Yes, Jerry's in this story too I'm told, but I havent gotten there yet. Moorcock can do that, as he's built a huge mythology around elevating his characters to archetypes.

Cornelius is recommended, but one is enough for the most part. As for his venture in the Whoniverse, a subject close to my own heart, well, it's a bit silly.

[Thanks to Prof. Faustaff for fact-checking. ]