What's lit's idea about À rebours (Against Nature)?

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someone explain what they meant by this

>>8501115
its pretty readable, huysmans' problems with naturalism are pretty thoroughly explained. you would be better served by knowing a good amount about latin/early christian literature: the best chapter of the book are des esseintes thoughts on writers throughout history with specific focus on writers like that; Cicero, Apuleius, Augustine, Claudian etc.

>>8501143
I don't want to wait for 47 fucking years.

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>>8501115
Absolutely, it's a really comfy eead. Sometimes the protagonist muses about some particular author/poem/painting, but that won't be any problem if you know how to use Google

>>8501417
If you didn't intuitively understand every line in this novel, there was no point in you even reading it.

>>8501171
>the best chapter of the book are des esseintes thoughts on writers

i skipped that chapter, it was boring as fuck, like dude we got it you have unpopular opinions on obscure books

>>8501417
His descriptions are detailed or sufficient enough that you wouldn't have to google things even if you were unfamiliar with them.

>Among these were some executed by an artist whose genius allured and entranced him: Gustave Moreau.

>Des Esseintes had acquired his two masterpieces and, at night, used to sink into revery before one of them — a representation of Salome, conceived in this fashion:

>A throne, resembling the high altar of a cathedral, reared itself beneath innumerable vaults leaping from heavy Romanesque pillars, studded with polychromatic bricks, set with mosaics, incrusted with lapis lazuli and sardonyx, in a palace that, like a basilica, was at once Mohammedan and Byzantine in design.

>In the center of the tabernacle, surmounting an altar approached by semi-circular steps, sat Herod the Tetrarch, a tiara upon his head, his legs pressed closely together, his hands resting upon his knees.

>His face was the color of yellow parchment; it was furrowed with wrinkles, ravaged with age. His long beard floated like a white cloud upon the star-like clusters of jewels constellating the orphrey robe fitting tightly over his breast.

>Around this form, frozen into the immobile, sacerdotal, hieratic pose of a Hindoo god, burned perfumes wafting aloft clouds of incense which were perforated, like phosphorescent eyes of beasts, by the fiery rays of the stones set in the throne. Then the vapor rolled up, diffusing itself beneath arcades where the blue smoke mingled with the gold powder of the long sunbeams falling from the domes.

>In the perverse odor of the perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of the temple, Salome, her left arm outstretched in a gesture of command, her right arm drawn back and holding a large lotus on a level with her face, slowly advances on her toes, to the rhythm of a stringed instrument played by a woman seated on the ground.

>Her face is meditative, solemn, almost august, as she commences the lascivious dance that will awaken the slumbering senses of old Herod. Diamonds scintillate against her glistening skin. Her bracelets, her girdles, her rings flash. On her triumphal robe, seamed with pearls, flowered with silver and laminated with gold, the breastplate of jewels, each link of which is a precious stone, flashes serpents of fire against the pallid flesh, delicate as a tea-rose: its jewels like splendid insects with dazzling elytra, veined with carmine, dotted with yellow gold, diapered with blue steel, speckled with peacock green.

>With a tense concentration, with the fixed gaze of a somnambulist, she beholds neither the trembling Tetrarch, nor her mother, the fierce Herodias who watches her, nor the hermaphrodite, nor the eunuch who sits, sword in hand, at the foot of the throne — a terrible figure, veiled to his eyes, whose breasts droop like gourds under his orange-checkered tunic.