Against the Grain

The most beautiful book about the death of beauty ever written. Des Esseintes, the last scion of a noble house, has come to understand that the world is unbearable, and so he flees it, retreating to a secluded villa at Fontenay where he constructs a universe of pure aesthetic sensation. Here, in rooms perfumed with exotic incense and lined with rare books, he conducts his own private religion of beauty: a tortoise encrusted with precious gems that dies beneath the weight of its own ornamentation; a dining table laid with food artificially colored to match the paintings he loves; a pharmacy of perfumes that conjure phantom cathedrals and Oriental landscapes. Huysmans wrote this novel, his narrator explained, "to see how far one could go in the direction of what one had made one's hobby." The result is a fever dream of excess, a document of aristocratic despair, and a portrait of consciousness refined until it becomes unbearable to itself. It is a book for anyone who has ever wanted to retreat from the vulgar modern world into something more perfect and more alone.