Download Against Nature (Against the Grain) AudioBook Free
Against Mother nature was one of the very most shocking French books of the 19th hundred years. When it was shared in 1884, it delighted the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of European countries on both factors of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for those its lofty build, it experienced, as its central, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same personality that challenged, even horrified, set up bourgeois society. Des Esseintes, a minor aristocrat but a high intellectual - deeply cultured and well-read - can't bear modern Parisian life in virtually any of its forms! As a youngsters he previously experienced the monastic environment and later academic life, but, left over unfulfilled, he immersed himself in the multifarious sensual pleasures so readily available in Paris. Still deeply unsatisfied, he makes a decision to go to a residence in a community in the countryside. Here he is able to create his own manipulated environment with a minutely designed interior supporting his particular imaginative tastes. Finally he is able to live alone with his books, his reflections, and his needs. Nothing at all will hinder how he needs to reside in, what he needs to see, to learn, to study, to smell, to consume. However, a life of such total personal indulgence, even on the lofty intellectual and artistically hypersensitive plane, proves anything but easy - or gratifying. The character of Des Esseintes, intense, assessment, infuriating, but astonishing, was thought to have been inspired by the famous aesthete of the time, the Comte de Montesquiou (also a model for Baron de Charlus in Proust's In Search of Lost Time), while Against Mother nature makes an unmistakeable appearance in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nicholas Boulton here reads among the best early on translations (shared anonymously and formerly titled Against the Grain), which has been revised to reinstate portions originally cut to safeguard sensibilities of the time. It is the full book as Huysmans supposed.
