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A Dilemma
Contributor(s): Huysmans, Joris Karl (Author), Vicari, Justin (Translator)
ISBN: 1939663113     ISBN-13: 9781939663115
Publisher: Wakefield Press
OUR PRICE:   $11.66  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: May 2015
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
Dewey: 843.8
Physical Information: 0.4" H x 4.5" W x 6.9" (0.20 lbs) 96 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - French
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Originally published in book form in French in 1887, Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Dilemma remains a particularly nasty little tale, a mordantly satiric and cruel account of bourgeois greed and manipulation that holds up as clear a mirror to today's neoliberalist times as it did to the French fin-de-si cle. Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous works--his 1881 Against Nature, which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891 exploration of Satanism, Down There--A Dilemma presents some of Huysmans' most memorable characters, including Madame Champagne, the self-appointed Parisian protector of women in need, and the carnal would-be sophisticate notary Le Ponsart, who wages a war of words with the bereft pregnant mistress of his deceased grandson with devastating consequences. In its unflinching portrayal of how authoritarian language can be used and abused as a weapon, this novella stands as Huysmans' indictment of the underlying crime of the novel itself: a language apparatus employed to maintain the appetites of the ruling class.

Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of different literary movements: from the grey and grimy Naturalism of books like Marthe and Downstream to the cornerstones of the Decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.