I first heard of Huysmans from reading Colin Wilson's The Books in My Life. When I was in the military in the early 1970s, one of my friends was very literate and read and recommended anything written by Colin Wilson. Over the years I have found Wilson to be one of my go to authors and in Books in My Life, he looked back at the books that influenced his life including the works of Huysmans.
LÃ -Bas is a strange and unusual novel with the narrative going in several alternate directions. At its center is Durtal, a writer who is working on a book detailing the life of the notorious Gilles de Rais, the 15th century child murderer, sadist, and practitioner of the black arts and occult. Durtal feels that he cannot really do justice to de Rais without experiencing first hand a black mass which his friends tell him are still practiced in the present day (the novel was first published in 1891). With the help of his mistress, Durtal does indeed attend a black mass and found it more disturbing than he thought it would be.
Other parts of the novel find Durtal and his associates, including a medical doctor versed in occult lore, a very religious bell-ringer, a learned astrologer, and Durtal's mistress who is an unsatisfied bourgeois by day and a "succubus" by night, involved in conversations about such things as the merits of naturalist writing and art, histories of bell ringing in cathedrals, the state of society and its politics, astrology, religion, and most of all, the occult and its uses in medicine and its use as an opposing force to religion. Many of the conversations take place in the cathedral where the bell-ringer resides and the descriptions of his ringing reminded me of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, another novel that I need to get to.
I found LÃ -Bas to be engaging but some of it was also very disturbing including details about de Rais and his atrocities. Also, the descriptions of the Black Mass attended by Durtal were quite graphic and sacrilegious. Other parts of the novel were very descriptive. One of my favorite descriptions was Huymans' details of Matthias Grunewald's naturalistic painting Crucifixion:
...the Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body. This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The labored tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. Te fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like to bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had penetrated...
The description of the painting goes on for another two pages and was as good or better than seeing the painting itself.
Overall, I found this novel to be compelling and moving. However, the language it was written in was sometimes stilted and contained many words which I had to google to get the full meaning. Not sure when or if I will read more of Huysmans but do mildly recommend this one.
LÃ -Bas is a strange and unusual novel with the narrative going in several alternate directions. At its center is Durtal, a writer who is working on a book detailing the life of the notorious Gilles de Rais, the 15th century child murderer, sadist, and practitioner of the black arts and occult. Durtal feels that he cannot really do justice to de Rais without experiencing first hand a black mass which his friends tell him are still practiced in the present day (the novel was first published in 1891). With the help of his mistress, Durtal does indeed attend a black mass and found it more disturbing than he thought it would be.
Other parts of the novel find Durtal and his associates, including a medical doctor versed in occult lore, a very religious bell-ringer, a learned astrologer, and Durtal's mistress who is an unsatisfied bourgeois by day and a "succubus" by night, involved in conversations about such things as the merits of naturalist writing and art, histories of bell ringing in cathedrals, the state of society and its politics, astrology, religion, and most of all, the occult and its uses in medicine and its use as an opposing force to religion. Many of the conversations take place in the cathedral where the bell-ringer resides and the descriptions of his ringing reminded me of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, another novel that I need to get to.
I found LÃ -Bas to be engaging but some of it was also very disturbing including details about de Rais and his atrocities. Also, the descriptions of the Black Mass attended by Durtal were quite graphic and sacrilegious. Other parts of the novel were very descriptive. One of my favorite descriptions was Huymans' details of Matthias Grunewald's naturalistic painting Crucifixion:
...the Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body. This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The labored tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. Te fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like to bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had penetrated...
The description of the painting goes on for another two pages and was as good or better than seeing the painting itself.
Overall, I found this novel to be compelling and moving. However, the language it was written in was sometimes stilted and contained many words which I had to google to get the full meaning. Not sure when or if I will read more of Huysmans but do mildly recommend this one.
