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With a title translated either as Against Nature or as Against The Grain, this wildly original fin-de-siècle novel follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess.
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That day, Des Esseintes took this incomparable book from his shelves and handled it devotedly, once more reading certain pieces which seemed to him, in this simple but inestimable frame, more than ordinarily penetrating.
Against the Grain, or a Rebours, was written by Joris Huysmans in 1884, and it tells the story of a young duke named Jean des Esseintes who indulges in a life of debauchery in Paris but suffers...
[Des Esseintes] spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own.
Against the Grain became the central document of the French Decadents, partly because its elaborate description of Des Esseintes’s tastes in art and literature established a frame of...
Sep 10, 2020 · Baron Jean des Esseintes’ judgement that the two locomotives are more beautiful than Woman plays itself out in significant variations through the texture of the novel, leading eventually to a...
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Who is Des Esseintes in against the grain?
Who is Des Esseintes?
Who is Jean des Esseintes?
Who is Des Esseintes in A Rebours?
Des Esseintes is a fictional character and the protagonist of the French novel À rebours (1884) by Huysmans, he is an eccentric, reclusive snob and dandy. He is said to have been partly based on Robert de Montesquiou , a French aristocrat who used his wit to shield himself from genuine human emotion, and partly on Francis Poictevin .
