From the Bookshelf of The Year of Reading Proust…
Find A Copy At
Group Discussions About This Book
*
Journal Articles: Reference List
By deleted member · 1 post · 79 views
last updated Jan 14, 2013 03:03PM
*
Auxiliary Reading Chit-Chat
By deleted member · 345 posts · 400 views
By deleted member · 345 posts · 400 views
last updated Apr 18, 2013 05:58AM
What Members Thought
It must have been so exciting to be a novelist in the second half of the nineteenth century. You weren't limited to just creating a novel; if you were talented, you could create a whole new kind of novel. Here, Huysmans has written the first example known to me of the novel where nothing happens. Frail, sickly des Esseintes has dissipated a good part of his inheritance on various kinds of vice (there is a memorable passage early on about the mirrors in his bedroom). Now he's tired of it. He reso
...more
Painfully beautiful, weighty ruminations on art, Latin , horticulture, Catholic literature and liturgical music parade past desiring only to be left alone. These stitches aphorisms and taxonimies obscure a darker edge to the novel. It is left unsaid but there is something of menace afoot.
Oct 26, 2007
Kimley
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
french,
19th-century
Dec 10, 2008
Robert
marked it as to-read
Feb 13, 2013
M
marked it as to-read
May 15, 2013
Jonathan
marked it as to-read
Feb 21, 2015
Ginny
marked it as to-read
