Melanie McDonagh reflects upon Benedictine blues.
It’s hard now to convey the importance of the novelist JK Huysmans for the French literary scene of the late 19th century and for the Catholic revival in France. He was famous as an elaborate stylist, for his idiosyncratic vocabulary, as a Decadent, as a Catholic convert. The tired aestheticism of Huysmans’ most famous book, Against Nature, can be summed up by his description of a tortoise whose shell the wealthy aesthete of the novel has embellished with jewels so he can see the precious stones moving about his apartment; the poor creature dies. The Oblate of 1903 is the last of his Durtal novels, and perhaps the least read of his works.
