No one, not even Toulouse-Lautrec, was so tireless a tracker of Paris's genius loci as Huysmans. Like many of his radical contemporaries, he was obsessed by the idea of beauty within the ugliness of back-street Paris, by the thought that the distortions of depravity presented a truer picture of our spiritual nature than conventional religion or revolutionary excess. The excellent introduction to these cameos show how Huysmans saw his art as complementary to the painter's. As the stories themselves testify, however, the results were not always successful. Compare for example, the sharp impressionistic portrayal of 'A Streetwalker' with the hazy, self-regarding raptures of 'The Overture to Tannhauser', a hyperventilating review characterised by sonorous phrases which pile up and collapse. But his symbolist mode yields as many rockets as damp squibs: 'A Nightmare' is genuinely chilling and oddly exultant. A tale about the wandering Jew is a mini-masterpiece. In this and other pieces, Huysmans begins and ends his tale with the same description - giving the whole the air of a medieval chant. Murrough Obrien in The Independent on Sunday

• We started tracking this book on July 2, 2014.
• This book was $9.39 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 85 times in the past 3,576 days.
• The current price of this book is $10.49 last checked 10 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past year.
• The lowest price to date was $7.99 last reached on April 22, 2018.
• This book has been $7.99 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $13.99 last reached on July 18, 2018.
• This book has been $13.99 5 times since we started tracking it.

• Literature & FictionClassicsShort Stories
• Literature & FictionClassicsClassics

• Publication Date: October 23, 2012
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 200 Pages
• File Size: 1,642 KB