Against the Grain
J.-K. Huysmans, 1884
A jaded aristocrat builds a house for one, fills it with jewels, liqueurs and strange books, and tries to live entirely on his nerves.
J.-K. Huysmans
1848–1907
Huysmans spent thirty years as a civil servant; À rebours, published in 1884, became a touchstone for Decadent writers, and the 'yellow book' in Wilde's Dorian Gray is modelled on it.
Feels like solitude, melancholy and art.
How much adornment a small life can bear.
It still lay quite still; he touched it, it was dead. Accustomed no doubt to a sedentary life, an uneventful existence spent under its humble carapace, it had not been able to support the dazzling splendour imposed on it, the glittering garment in which it had been clad, the pavement of precious stones wherewith they had inlaid its poor back like a jewelled pyx. Books by J.-K. Huysmans
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