Against Nature
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Summary
Editor's review
In literary terms, the work's most striking quality is its astonishing prescience. The interior decoration, perfume blending, floral aesthetics, and even neurotic self-scrutiny described in the book precisely anticipate many cultural phenomena and psychological states of the twentieth century and beyond. With encyclopedic knowledge and microscope-like detail, Huysmans constructs a wholly self-sufficient aesthetic universe. The writing itself becomes an act of resistance—extreme refinement against the coarseness of the industrial age, the authority of subjective experience against the hegemony of objective reality.
This Shanghai Translation Publishing House edition is well translated and thoroughly annotated, particularly helpful for Chinese readers navigating the book's many references to art, religion, and the occult. Reading requires a slow pace, because the novel is not essentially plot-driven but a slowly unfolding sensory experiment. It invites the reader into a special mode of reading: both spectator and accomplice, witnessing how a soul achieves absolute spiritual freedom through self-imposed exile.
Read in a contemporary context, À rebours takes on more complex significance. Des Esseintes's attempt to aestheticize life completely is both fascinating and unsettling—it is resistance to alienation and, at the same time, a deeper alienation. This duality ensures that a work born at the end of the nineteenth century still provokes profound reflection on individual freedom, aesthetic ethics, and the predicaments of modernity.
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in French Symbolist and Decadent literature
- Scholars and students studying Aestheticism and the origins of modernism
- Thinkers drawn to unconventional ways of living and extreme aesthetic experience
- Sensitive souls who feel alienated in contemporary life and seek spiritual resonance
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting tight plotting and traditional narrative structure
- Readers lacking patience for or background knowledge of the many artistic and religious allusions
Reading tips
- Read the translator's preface or related literary-historical background first to understand the late-nineteenth-century French cultural context
- Keep a notebook of the artworks, writers, and allusions mentioned; further reading will greatly deepen understanding
- Read slowly chapter by chapter, pausing after each to reflect on where the protagonist's experience resonates with, and diverges from, your own
About the publisher
Shanghai Translation Publishing House is a Chinese publisher oriented mainly toward translation and publishing. Its publications cover foreign literature, world classics and classic works, as well as social culture, folk literature and classical poetry. The database contains 2,618 titles, including Never Let Me Go, Les Misérables (2 volumes), Don Quixote (illustrated collector's edition), The Complete Comedies of Molière (4 volumes), The Complete Novels of Kafka (3 volumes), The Collected Works of Dostoevsky (9-volume set), Reason and Persons, and Oedipus Rex (Translation Classics). Its author resources include foreign writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Victor Hugo, Cervantes and Molière, as well as translators such as Zheng Kelu, Sun Jiameng, Li Jianwu and Zhang Kun. The publisher has brands such as "Translation Classics Selections" and "Translation Documentary," and emphasizes translated works in foreign literature and the humanities and social sciences, while also publishing bilingual dictionaries and foreign-language educational books. Public information is limited; the above is based on the book information in the database.
Contents
- 版权信息
- 中译本序言
- 作者序言
- 逆流
- 说明
- 一
- 二
- 三
- 四
- 五
- 六
- 七
- 八
- 九
- 十
- 十一
- 十二
- 十三
- 十四
- 十五
- 十六
- 《逆流》在同时代作家中引起的反响和评价
FAQ
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About the author
Joris-Karl Huysmans was a French writer. The Chinese book database includes one work by him, namely Against Nature (À rebours). Because public information is limited, this entry does not elaborate on the details of his life and instead focuses on the work itself. Against Nature is generally classified as foreign literature. Its plot centers on a protagonist who withdraws from society and immerses himself in refined sensory experiences. Through meticulous descriptions of objects, smells, artworks, and literature, the novel expresses weariness with the ordinary social order and a fixation on artificial beauty. The writing is delicate, the narrative pace is slow, and the sensory and psychological details are layered, giving the work a strong aesthetic and decadent character. Huysmans's writing is often seen in literary history as a link between naturalism and later modern aesthetic sensibilities, and Against Nature has accordingly become an important text for understanding late nineteenth-century European literary trends.
Yu Zhongxian is an author and translator about whom limited public information is available; the library holds fourteen of his works. Representative titles include the Collected Works of Diderot (eight volumes), the See You Up There trilogy (three volumes), A Little to the Right, The Farewell Waltz, Laughable Loves, The Testaments Betrayed, The Satin Slipper, and Friday, or, The Other Island. Judging from these titles and the common categories under which they are listed, his work centers on the translation and editing of foreign literature, while also touching on classics, social fiction, essays and miscellaneous writings, and folk literature, which suggests a broad range of interests. In subject and style, the texts involved include both classics that combine philosophical reflection with narrative and contemporary works that observe social life in a light, agile tone. Through these translations and selections, readers can encounter the narrative approaches and intellectual currents of literature in different languages and appreciate the care with which the translator conveys tone, rhythm, and cultural context.
