Against Nature: A New Translation of 'a Rebours' (Penguin Classics)

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But there’s something about this cult-favorite of decadent prose that is so intriguing and fascinating. He collects rare specimens of everything and if there does not exist a rarity he believes he should have, he has it created from his own detailed drawings and directions. He used this experience in an early story, " Sac au dos" (Backpack) (later included in his collection, Les Soirées de Médan). It looked rather like a clog or a tidy, and on top was a human tongue bent back with the string stretched tight, just as you may see it depicted in the plates of medical works dealing with diseases of the throat and mouth; two little wings, of a jujube red, which might almost have been borrowed from a child’s toy windmill, completed this baroque combination of the underside of a tongue, the colour of wine lees and slate, and a glossy pocket-case with a lining that oozed drops of viscous paste.

non poteva dirgli quando sarebbe stato di ritorno, se tra un anno, un mese, una settimana o anche prima.

On that day my object will be achieved: I shall have contributed, to the best of my ability, to the making of a scoundrel, one enemy the more for the hideous society which is bleeding us white. Some might argue that the theme is the gross emptiness of decadence, but I don't think the work's scattered repetition does very much to explore it. In 1905, his admirers persuaded the French government to promote him to Officier de la Légion d'honneur for his literary achievements. The long lists of his preferences and dislikes that fill the book are, for the most part, empty opinions.

Clearly, artificiality is neither the problem nor the solution, but a mere cover-up for the real issues. I mean, how strong must that impulse be to reject all these things that people tell us we are supposed to be? I read this as a companion to The Picture of Dorian Gray (this book was hugely influential for Wilde, and the Decadence movement in England more generally. The original French edition, published in lurid yellow wrappers to warn of the salacious content, is believed to have been the source of the name of The Yellow Book (published from 1894 to 1897), the British literary journal associated with decadence and aestheticism. It is not like reading a treatise of William Morris' and coming to understand a particular aesthetic of how a book should be bound and why--it is a mere litany of excess, the dull and trashy kind of overspending which marks the parvenu.Think for a minute just how much space in your brain is devoted to information like that, stuff you don’t know you remember until suddenly, you hear it again. The idea of therapy is to take things that are hidden within your brain--biases, prejudices, hangups, fears, habits--and to bring them to the surface, to make you aware of them so they can be processed, or even gotten rid of.