Sorry to disagree, but I’ve always found artificial recreations or similes of the real thing to be at best lacking – worse, utterly distasteful.

I read it in the Robert Baldick translation, from 1959 and put out by Penguin, and as I’d earlier this summer loved Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary, I thought maybe I’d see about rereading a newer translation.He is an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete and the last representative of an aristocratic family. While McGuinness's intro makes a good case for "Against the Grain" as a better title, beware of the Dover edtion under that name: it's old and expurgated, as is the illustrated one from the '30s).

While it is true that it may have been primarily if not singlehandedly responsible for Wilde’s shift from wry if essentially populist entertainments like The Importance of Being Earnest to more ‘sordid’ aesthetic efforts such as Salome and Dorian Gray (whose lead character refers to an influential “poisonous little book” during the course of the proceedings, which was in fact A Rebours), it is also true that such literary precedents as Barbey D’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques (and his adoption and advertisement of Dandyism per se), closely related Romantic writings from the likes of Theophile Gautier (who was one of the first to adopt the derisive term of “decadent” as a badge of honor and stylistic descriptor of his own efforts) and works even Des Esseintes notes as influential such as Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and translations of Poe, the poetry of Verlaine and Stephane Mallarme, and artists like Gustave Moreau and Felicien Rops were already producing works in this vein. His isolation, like everything else he's tried, inevitably fails him and his words in the final chapter are full of emotional despair for the things in life he cannot find, nor entirely understand. Having spent so much time in Decadence as a literary genre before circling back around to this book, I have to say that it had little real impact and bore few surprises.

Like Durtal in La Bas (and later, as I understand it, in his Catholic trilogy), he is seeking an intellectual and aesthetic escape into a mythic or at least mythologized past, where things must have been better, where the problems Huysmans’ ciphers and masks of the projected self struggle with would never have existed. The main focus of the play was the dance, in which seven silk scarves work as extensions of the performers body. but now, by leading him here, in the middle of a luxury the existence of which he hadn’t even suspected and which will engrave itself indelibly on his memory, by offering him…such a prize as this, he’ll get accustomed to the pleasures that are beyond his means to enjoy.