Disgusted with society and exhausted by excess, one man retreats from the world to create a private universe devoted entirely to beauty, artifice, and sensation.
Jean des Esseintes, the last descendant of a declining aristocratic family, abandons Paris and withdraws to a secluded house at Fontenay. Determined to escape everything he considers vulgar and ordinary, he surrounds himself with rare books, strange works of art, exotic plants, precious stones, elaborate perfumes, unusual music, and carefully constructed sensory experiences. Nature itself seems inadequate to his refined tastes; only the artificial, exceptional, and decadent can satisfy his restless imagination.
Yet the more completely Des Esseintes separates himself from ordinary existence, the more fragile his private world becomes. His experiments in aesthetic perfection give way to illness, memory, religious fascination, and an increasingly desperate search for something capable of filling the emptiness beneath his cultivated pleasures. Darkly humorous, provocative, and intensely introspective, J. K. Huysmans's Against the Grain is a remarkable exploration of decadence, isolation, aesthetic obsession, spiritual longing, and one man's attempt to live entirely outside the conventions of his age.
