(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.
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