The Damned
A Occult, Classics, European Literature book. I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no...
Joris-Karl Huysmans' shocking novel of an innocent's descent into a world of depraved, blasphemous rituals, The Damned (Là-Bas) caused a scandal when it was first published in nineteenth-century France. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction and notes by Terry Hale.Durtal, a shy, censorious man, is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais, the monstrous fifteenth-century child-murderer thought...
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- Filetype: PDF
- Pages: 320 pages
- ISBN: 9780140447675 / 140447679
HJ6FLtr_hI-.pdf
More About The Damned
I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less... Speaking of dust, out of which we came and to which we shall return, do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds of worms according as we are fat or thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy at bellies. Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms. Joris-Karl Huysmans,... Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul. Joris-Karl Huysmans, L-Bas //
J. K. Huysmans, La-Bas (Dover, 1891)Ah, Huysmans, the author who pioneered the novel of "two people spending a whole chapter talking about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the plot, theme, or story." La-Bas (translated, "Down There") is billed by the blurb-writer who did the back cover as "the classic of Satanism" thanks... FINAL THOUGHTS:I'm not going to be able to do this book justice. It's one of those reads where you want to mark the book up with underlines because of all the great quotes and all the passages that are so relevant to today. The book is a great read, very different. It covers so much philosophical, historical and transgressive territory.... It seems to me that this is a lopsided book: a little dull for the first half, until Mme. Chantelouve comes on the scene and then things get interesting. The book could have been boiled down to simply four chapters (chapters 18-21) with very little consequence. However, the book does have an interestingly modern view of the condition...
