Author(s): J.K. Huysmans (Author), Brendan King (Author)
Publisher: Dedalus Ltd
Publication Date: 26 Sept. 2014
Edition: 3rd edition
Language: English
Print length: 190 pages
ISBN-10: 1903517249
ISBN-13: 9781903517246
Book Description
First published in 1880, same year as Edgar Degas’ The Dancing Lesson and Edouard Manet’s solo show of brasserie paintings at La Vie Moderne gallery, J.-K. Huysmans’ Parisian Sketches shares with these vibrant Impressionist works a fascination with the contemporary life of Paris, an exuberant Paris in the era of the Opéra Garnier and the Folies-Bergères. Like the striking images of the early Impressionists, whom Huysmans championed when it was unfashionable to do so, Parisian Sketches is an all-out assault on the visual senses. Composed of a series of intense, meticulously observed impressions – of café concerts and circus performers, of streetwalkers and hot-chestnut sellers, of run-down slums and forgotten quarters in the grimy, shiny ‘City of Light’- Parisian Sketches recreates the Paris of the bal masqué and the cancan, the brasseries à femme and the buveurs d’absinthe, all captured with an intimacy and an immediacy that confirms Huysmans as one of the masters of 19th century French prose. Huysmans captures the pre-Haussmann Paris which was soon to disappear with his big boulevards and extensive building programme. An impressionist masterpiece in words.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘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.’ –Murrough Obrien in The Independent on Sunday
‘The nouveau journalism (new in 1880, anyway) described people who were artists’ subjects – a hefty blonde trapeze artist at the Folies Bergere shaking the safety net, a journeyman baker like a powered Pierrot pummelling flaccid dough with mighty blows. And places, too, out on the fetid edges of a capital that was jerrybuilding distant arrondissements as fast as possible after Haussman had remodelled the ancient rues into grand boulevards. Huysmans was a genuine flaneur – no posing and no lounging, he was up and out every day filling notebooks with info we wouldn’t otherwise now know about, such as the varied erotic odours of the female armpit before the invention of antiperspirant.’ –VR in the Guardian
‘Huysmans created evocative prose-pictures of Parisian life – a visit to the barber, a gloomy railway café, a chestnut-seller – that merit comparison with the pictures of Caillebotte, Degas and Atget.’ –Christopher Hirst in the Independent
About the Author
J.-K. Huysmans (1847-1907) began writing as a naturalist in the style of Zola. His first novel Marthe(1876) was published by Dedalus in 2006 in a new translation by Brendan King. His early works excel in their descriptive ability and he is one of the greatest authors at describing the life of Paris and its surroundings as witnessed by his Parisian Sketches (Dedalus translation by Brendan King in 2004). He changed from being an obscure author and art critic to one of the most famous authors of his day with the publication of A Rebours in 1884. A Rebours is a ground breaking novel which captures the decadent spirit of the day and marks his final break with Zola and naturalism. Dedalus’s translation by Brendan King was published in May 2008. His novel about Satanism, La-Bas (1891) is surely the cult novel of the nineteenth century. La-Bas is the first of four novels about Huysmans alter ego Durtal. Dedalus has published English translations of En Route (1895), The Cathedral (1898) and The Oblate of St Benedict (1903). Robert Baldick’s brilliant book The Life of J.-K. Huysmans was published by Dedalus in the autumn of 2005, updated and edited by Brendan King. In 2010 Dedalus published Brendan King’s new translation of Stranded (En Rade), followed in 2012 by the first English translation of The Vatard Sisters.
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