Search
Log in
  • Home

  • Categories

  • Audiobooks

  • E-books

  • Magazines

  • For kids

  • Top lists

  • Help

  • Download app

  • Use campaign code

  • Redeem gift card

  • Try free now
  • Log in
  • Language

    🇧🇪 Belgique

    • FR
    • EN

    🇩🇰 Danmark

    • DK
    • EN

    🇩🇪 Deutschland

    • DE
    • EN

    🇪🇸 España

    • ES
    • EN

    🇫🇷 France

    • FR
    • EN

    🇳🇱 Nederland

    • NL
    • EN

    🇳🇴 Norge

    • NO
    • EN

    🇦🇹 Österreich

    • AT
    • EN

    🇨🇭 Schweiz

    • DE
    • EN

    🇫🇮 Suomi

    • FI
    • EN

    🇸🇪 Sverige

    • SE
    • EN
  1. Books
  2. Classics and poetry
  3. Classics

Read and listen for free for 30 days!

Cancel anytime

Try free now
1.0(1)

Against the Grain or Against Nature

Against The Grain, or Against Nature is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans.

“THE BOOK THAT DORIAN GRAY LOVED AND THAT INSPIRED OSCAR WILDE”. Such is the enticing epigraph of one early translation of Huysmans’ cult novel of 1884, which is also routinely called the Bible of Decadence. Accurate descriptions, both, of this bizarre masterpiece which has reverberated ever since through high and popular culture.

Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes 19th-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. À rebours contains many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature.

“Against Nature” (or in this version “Against The Grain”) explores to the furthest limit the life of the world-rejecting aesthete living a reclusive existence devoted entirely to artificial paradises of his own devising. This is no solemn tract, however: the book’s anti-hero Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes spectacularly fails to achieve his life’s work, as all his attempts to create worlds of perverse experience through synaesthesia and interior decoration prove ludicrously unsatisfying and injurious to health. An innocent tortoise also falls casualty to his theories, in the wonderful fifth chapter.

Against The Grain, or Against Nature was originally published in 1884 and this edition is translated by John Howard. However, this translation lacks a chapter, and two brief incidents are also suppressed on account of their sexual perversity. Enjoy what remains.

Audiobook read by Martin Geeson, running Time 9 hours, 5 min. Unabridged full version. Also available as E-Book: ePUB, 60,000 words, average reading time 5 hours.

Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (1848-1907) was a French novelist and art critic who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans. He is most famous for the novel À rebours (1884, published in English as Against the Grain or Against Nature.)


Author:

  • Joris-Karl Huysmans

Narrator:

  • Martin Geeson

Format:

  • Audiobook
  • E-book

Duration:

  • 9 h 5 min
  • 161 pages

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Classics and poetry
  • Classics

More by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Skip the list
  1. A rebours

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  2. Marthe, et autres nouvelles

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  3. Les soeurs Vatard

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  4. Le drageoir aux épices

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  5. Marthe et autres nouvelles

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  6. Les sœurs Vatard

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  7. En Route

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  8. Là-bas

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  9. La Cathédrale

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  10. À Rebours

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book
  11. Die Meisterwerke der Französischen Literatur: Eine Sammlung Unvergesslicher Klassiker

    Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, André Gide, Voltaire, George Sand, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, François Rabelais, Stendhal, Denis Diderot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette, Alphonse Daudet, Jules Verne, Antoine-François Prévost, Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marquis de Sade, Anatole France, Alfred de Musset, Guy de Maupassant, Jean Giraudoux, François René Chateaubriand, Guillaume de Lorris, Pierre de Beaumarchais, Molière, Jean Baptiste Racine, Edmond Rostand, Pierre Corneille, Charles Perrault, Bluefire Books

    book
  12. À rebours

    Joris-Karl Huysmans

    book

Others have also read

Skip the list
  1. B. J. Harrison Reads The Phantom of the Opera

    Gaston Leroux

    audiobook
  2. The Phantom of the Opera

    Gaston Leroux

    audiobookbook
  3. The Phantom of the Opera

    Gaston Leroux

    audiobookbook
  4. The Phantom of the Opera

    Gaston Leroux

    audiobookbook
  5. Heart Talk: Reflections : 52 Weeks of Self-Love, Self-Care, and Self-Discovery

    Cleo Wade

    audiobook
  6. The Phantom of the Opera

    Gaston Leroux

    audiobookbook
  7. A Doll's House

    Henrik Ibsen

    audiobookbook
  8. The Moonlight Gardening Club

    Rosie Hannigan

    audiobook
  9. De zeven echtgenoten van Evelyn Hugo

    Taylor Jenkins Reid

    audiobookbook
  10. Ik heb het echt gemaakt

    Chantal Claassen

    audiobookbook
  11. A Man at Arms

    Steven Pressfield

    audiobook
  12. The Profession

    Steven Pressfield

    audiobook

Help and contact


About us

  • Our story
  • Career
  • Press
  • Accessibility
  • Nextory One
  • Partner with us
  • Investor relations
  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Explore

  • Categories
  • Audiobooks
  • E-books
  • Magazines
  • For kids
  • Top lists

Popular categories

  • Crime
  • Biographies and reportage
  • Fiction
  • Feel-good and romance
  • Personal development
  • Children's books
  • True stories
  • Sleep and relaxation

Nextory

Copyright © 2025 Nextory AB

Privacy Policy · Terms ·
Excellent4.3 out of 5