Synopses & Reviews
Fiction. Translated from the French by Robert Baldick. Set in late nineteenth-century Paris, this is the story of civil servant Jean Folantin, a man beset with melancholy induced by middle-aged loneliness, nihilism, and toiling for a wage that scarcely allows him to subsist. His days are composed of office drudgery; in the evenings he searches in vain for a decent meal. His nights are spent alone. Whether DOWNSTREAM is the political tale of a man's enslavement by poverty or, instead, a psychological tale of his reluctance to genuinely invest hope in anything that actually matters, it is without a doubt J.K. Huysmans in a foul and visionary mood.
Synopsis
Downstream, the shortest and most autobiographical of Huysmans’ novels, is the perfect example of what the French naturalists wanted a novel to be. This dark and mordantly comic masterpiece of everyday pessimism about a Parisian clerk seeking spiritual contentment is the perfect introduction to the pleasures of Joris Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), whose exquisite style is ironically the most perfect remedy for any reader’s taedium vitae.
Synopsis
A Parisian clerk seeks spiritual contentment in this small, dark, mordantly comic masterpiece of everyday pessimism.
About the Author
Joris Karl Huysmans was born in Paris in 1848 of Dutch parents. He died on May 13, 1907, the last of the little band of Naturalists which included Zola, Daudet, and the Goncourts. Huysmans was the preeminent Parisian writer. Huysmans worked, like the hero of "Downstream," as a low-level clerk in the Ministry of the Interior.