En Route
1895
A man who once investigated Satanism now finds himself kneeling in a Trappist monastery. Such is the improbable journey of Durtal, Joris-Karl Huysmans' thinly veiled alter ego, in this 1895 novel that scandalized the Catholic Church even as it chronicled one man's return to faith. En Route opens in the church of St. Sulpice, where Durtal seeks refuge from the spiritual void of modern Paris, drawn by the haunting beauty of plainchant and the mysterious weight of liturgy. What unfolds is neither straightforward conversion narrative nor simple redemption story, but something far more unsettling: a meditation on how aesthetic obsession might become, improbably, a path to God. Huysmans fills these pages with the sensory richness of Catholic ritual, the architecture of faith, the music that moves beyond words, all rendered with the same painstaking detail he once lavished on the occult. The Church condemned the book for obscenity, which tells you everything about how uncomfortable this portrait of a tortured, decadent soul finding grace truly was. For readers who crave literature that wrestles with the messiness of belief, that asks whether beauty can save us, this remains a strange and powerful artifact of fin-de-siècle spiritual anxiety.
