At the novel's center is Durtal, a writer obsessed with the life of one of the blackest figures in history, Gilles de Rais — child murderer, sadist, necrophile, and practitioner of all the black arts. The book's authentic, extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the Black Mass have never been surpassed.
Durtal Series
This series delves into the dark corners of the human psyche and occult mysteries. It follows a protagonist's descent into a world of satanic rituals, magic, and decadence. This is a fascinating immersion into the decadent atmosphere of the fin de siècle, where the lines between reality and the supernatural blur. The works explore obsession, depravity, and the search for meaning in the darkest reaches of existence.
Recommended Reading Order
En Route
- 322 pages
- 12 hours of reading
In this autobiographical novel, the author tells the story of a writer and his return to the Catholic faith. An admirer of the Middle Ages, cathedrals, and ancient religious painting, the hero stays in a convent to try to resolve his moral dilemma. A novel of conversion, which fails, it explores spiritual life, the church, and the convent, paving the way for later writers like Mauriac and Bernanos. Finally, like "Against Nature," it is a great narcissistic reverie, an interior monologue where erotic imagination and prayer, aestheticism and asceticism struggle. As the author himself said, he fell "like a meteorite."
The Cathedral
- 364 pages
- 13 hours of reading
After the Satanic debaucheries of La -bas (1891) and the sensual battles of En Route (1895), comes the cloistered calm of The Cathedral (1898). In this long, reflective novel, Huysmans' alter-ego, Durtal, sets out to explore the mystic symbolism embodied in one of the greatest gothic edifices in France, Chartres cathedral. Written at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, a political scandal that threatened to tear France apart, Chartres cathedral became for Huysmans a potent symbol of the harmonious diversity of the Middle Ages, one that had the potential to unify the divisions in contemporary French society. This complex, multi-layered vision of Chartres cathedral as a structure in which art, science and religion could exist in harmony rather than discord, captured the public imagination on its first publication, and The Cathedral became a runaway bestseller. This edition contains 20 photographs of parts of Chartres cathedral mentioned in the text.