Against the Grain

A Rebours (Against the Grain) by JK Huysmans, 339 pages

Against the Grain is not the story as much as the description of the retreat of the misanthrope Jean des Esseintes into aesthetic seclusion, to live in a world entirely of his own imagination.  The exquisite taste of des Esseintes scorns the vulgarity of fin-de-siecle Paris, "the Caliphate of the counting-house", demanding that everything be custom-tailored to his exacting specifications, his rooms decorated in carefully selected shades of blue and yellow so as to appear their best in candlelight, mechanisms installed with which he is able to precisely reproduce any taste or scent he desires, books collected combining the late antique Latin authors with the best poets and novelists of his own era, the detritus of a lost world spiced with a hint of degeneracy and decay.  Ultimately, inevitably, his self-indulgent solitude collapses into illness and madness. 

A Rebours is the greatest Decadent novel, although it is not Huysman's best - En Route and even La Bas are superior.  It stands at the limits of nineteenth century French realism, and at the threshold of something ever ancient, ever new.