Against the grain : (A rebours)

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Zaidenberg

The 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. The novel contains many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature.