>>24945129
He’s literally me though

>>24945129
If you don't identify with the main character, with his ennui and contrarianism, what are you even doing on 4chan? Just substitute any of his excesses with one of your own. Don't you find yourself playing obscure dungeon crawlers, map painters or shmups, eschewing anything popular? No fucked up fetishes from overexposure to porn?
If you insist in keeping him at an arm's distance, you can see the book as taking naturalism to its logical limit, taking the naturalistic novel format and filling it with the psychological profile of someone who's almost a caricature but who could also feasibly be considered real. A deconstruction of the naturalistic novel, where everything natural is replaced with the artificial, Against Nature if you will.
>Zola told Huysmans that the book had been a "terrible blow to Naturalism" and accused him of "leading the school astray" and "burning [his] boats with such a novel", claiming that "no type of literature was possible in this genre, exhausted by a single volume".[19]

>>24945129
This is what happens when y'all don't keep the GRRM hate containment threads up, this poor lad is lost and confused.

>>24945201
>fucked up fetishes from overexposure to porn?
I knew I belonged here

>>24945129
thats a really gay cover

>>24945409
Not that there's anything wrong with being gay

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>>24945409
Penguin once again mogged by OWC

I read it as a very dry comedy and I think in that lens it's one of the funniest books I've ever read, almost certainly the funniest I've run into from that era.
Des Esseintes is spiritually the most /lit/ person anybody could invent from the 19th century. He is a bored dandy who thinks he's a world-class genius based only on having superior taste despite zero accomplishments over the course of his entire life.
Every episode reads like a shameful anecdote that some rich retard with zero self-awareness would write into a greentext. His autistic nautical-themed pretend playroom where his servants have to LARP with him, his perfume studio where he knocks himself out breathing in noxious shit, picking up a catamite out of "what if I'm gay wouldn't that be the /lit/ lifestyle" curiosity then getting embarassed by the whole effort, and deciding his amazing masterpiece rug is missing organic movement that he provides by bejewelling a turtle, killing the turtle, and bemoaning that it must have died from "being too beautiful." It's fucking hilarious.

>>24945906
>who thinks he's a world-class genius based only on having superior taste despite zero accomplishments over the course of his entire life.
What the fuck but that's me though

>decadent novel
>cover art is either someone lying on a sofa, salome or a demon
Every fucking time.

>>24945906
This is absolutely how I'm reading it but I can't get over how it spawned a whole movement inspired by Des Esseintes with Huysmans as a figurehead of it. Everyone including its author seemed to take it seriously when it comes across as so pathetic and hilarious.

>>24945903
Nah the Penguin cover is so much better, and the Oxford translation is censored

>>24946509
it's just the Valley Girl effect
>oh there's a new meme way of talking/dressing/living?
>looks fun, I'll try it out for myself
>no I don't care that the thing only caught popular attention because of a satire or lampoon, I'm going all in

>>24945903
>putting le painting mentioned in the book on le cover
Midwit cover design

>>24946509
Huysmans definitely had a sense of humor about himself and the character. As with all things, he did not maintain one precise emotional register or perspective on his work which, self-awarely comic as it is, is obviously also full of genuine sympathy for the aesthetic-misanthropic-religious mode of life Des Esseintes (and Durtal, in his final novels) lives.

CAPTCHA: 2RAWW

>>24946525
>Oxford translation is censored
How comes?

>>24946696
Bot response

>>24946779
I'm not a bot, motherfucker.