Huysmans (1848-1907) fue primero seguidor de Zola, para luego entrar en la corriente espiritual, decandente y refinada, en la que brillo también Villiers de L'isle-Adam, su gran amigo. A contrapelo es la gran novela de la ruptura con un Naturalismo ya exhausto. Es la novela de la nueva sensibilidad estética, inconformista, encarnada en su protagonista, el excéntrico duque Jean Floressas des Esseintes, quien tras haber llevado una vida mundana en un París que considera mediocre, decide marcharse a provincias, a una casa señorial situada en la localidad de Fontenay. En ese lugar construye un espacio adecuado, casi al detalle, a lo que él considera de su gusto y agrado. Una vez ya acomodado, el lector podrá adentrarse en esa figura iconoclasta, y conocer a un antihéore que detesta todo lo que parezca burgués o tenga ecos de un utilitarismo que ha invadido cada rincón de París, considerando que tal tendencia corrompe la vida y, sobre todo, el arte al ser el objetivo del artista el satisfacer a un público que paga y no el realizar obras sublimes.

This novel is a story of two working-class sisters, but the main protagonist is Paris, suburban Paris, the Paris of railway stations, cheap restaurants and cafe-concerts, and the passages that describe the music-halls and crowds of the Avenue de Maine and the Boulevard Saint Michel have a visual immediacy."

Against Nature is the perfect illustration of Oscar Wilde's famous paradox that life imitates art, and not the other way around. First published in Paris in 1884 when the Naturalistic school - of which Huysmans himself was a major figure - was at its height, it delivered a body-blow to Zola's brand of literary realism, and almost single-handedly redefined the literary and artistic canon of the nineteenth century in the process. To a rising generation of readers, writers and artists across Europe, Huysmans' novel was the instruction manual of a movement that was to become emblematic of fin-de-siecle France: Decadence. The novel tells the story of its decadent aristocratic anti-hero, Jean Floressas des Esseintes, who, bored by the aesthetic and carnal pleasures the Parisian beau monde has to offer, decides to sell up and move to an isolated house in the suburbs. There he constructs a world of artifice that exactly minors his super-subtle, perverse and painfully neurotic sensibility. The result is one of the most bizarre, intriguing and influential books of the period. Whether read as an existential fable, psychological analysis, style manual, cultural critique or social satire, the novel remains as audacious and original today as when first published.

The hero of this curious novel is des Esseintes, a neurasthenic aristocrat who has turned his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreated to an isolated country villa. Here, accompanied only by a couple of silent servants, he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems, and complex perfumes and embarks on a series of increasingly strange aesthetic experiments, starting with the decision to give his giant pet tortoise a jewel-encrusted shell...

At the novel's center is Durtal, a writer obsessed with the life of one of the blackest figures in history, Gilles de Rais – child murderer, sadist, necrophile and practitioner of all the black arts. The book's authentic, extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the Black Mass have never been surpassed.