Recommendations
Books Like En rade by J.-K. Huysmans
Books for readers who love the novel of failed escape and the dream that cannot be sustained in waking life
En rade (1887) is Naturalism interrupted by symbolist nightmares — Jacques and Louise's rural retreat fails in every practical way, while Jacques's dream life achieves the beauty the waking world refuses. These 8 books share its failed escape and its surplus of unconscious desire.
- 1Buy on Amazon
À rebours
by J.-K. Huysmans
The Decadent novel that precedes En rade — Des Esseintes's artificial paradise is the successful version of the escape that Jacques fails at; both end with the escapee being forced back by medical necessity
- 2Buy on Amazon
Là-bas
by J.-K. Huysmans
The next step in Huysmans's trajectory — Durtal investigates Satanism as Jacques investigated rural life, finding the same unsatisfying mixture of ugliness and fleeting transcendence
- 3
Buy on AmazonLa Faute de l'abbé Mouret
by Émile Zola
Zola's most lyrical Rougon-Macquart novel — an amnesiac priest lives in an enclosed garden paradise before being returned to the real world; the same structure as En rade's dream sequences
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
The extended version of the failed retreat — Hans Castorp goes to a Swiss sanatorium for three weeks and stays seven years, the world outside receding as the mountain world becomes totalizing
- 5
Buy on AmazonLe Grand Meaulnes
by Alain-Fournier
The French novel of the dreamscape that cannot be returned to — Meaulnes finds the enchanted estate once and spends the rest of his life failing to return; the waking world as disappointment after the dream
- 6
Buy on AmazonGerminal
by Émile Zola
The Naturalist novel of entrapment that En rade inverts — Zola's miners cannot escape the mine, where Huysmans's couple have chosen the countryside and find it equally imprisoning
- 7
Buy on AmazonIn the Penal Colony
by Franz Kafka
Kafka's dreamlike logic applied to institutional violence — En rade's dream sequences have the same quality of symbolic inevitability that Kafka makes his waking mode
- 8
Buy on AmazonHunger
by Knut Hamsun
Norwegian contemporary of Huysmans's later Naturalism — the same hypersensitive male consciousness that cannot find adequate conditions in the world, with the same mix of documentary precision and hallucinatory interior
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