Against nature

As Joris-Karl Huysmans predicted in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private museum of high taste, he indulges his pleasure in fine art and literature. A compendium of fin-de-siecle cultural decadence, the novel anticipates strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarme, and Poe.