Recommendations
Books Like Les Hors-Nature
Best books to read after Les Hors-Nature by Rachilde
Readers who respond to Les Hors-Nature's portrait of the mutual destruction of two brothers, Rachilde's systematic analysis of transgressive desire, and the Decadent treatment of bonds beyond the natural will find the wider tradition of French fin-de-siècle fiction.
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Buy on AmazonMonsieur Vénus
by Rachilde
Monsieur Vénus (1884) is the essential predecessor of Les Hors-Nature and the best introduction to Rachilde's method: reading it first shows the logic of construction-as-desire that Les Hors-Nature applies to the brother bond, and the two novels together constitute Rachilde's fullest treatment of the will's attempt to remake the given orders of nature.
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La Marquise de Sade
by Rachilde
La Marquise de Sade (1887) is the intermediate novel between Monsieur Vénus and Les Hors-Nature in Rachilde's development: the Marquise's cruelty as an expression of female desire is the bridge between Raoule's aesthetic construction of Jacques and Paul-Éric's destructive construction of Reutler.
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Buy on AmazonÀ Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
À Rebours (1884) is the founding text of the French Decadent tradition that Les Hors-Nature belongs to: Des Esseintes's construction of an artificial world that exceeds nature anticipates Paul-Éric's construction of his brother as the object of his total desire — both novels treat the will's attempt to create a self-sufficient world outside the natural order.
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's great novel about three brothers and their mutual implication in a father's death is the most powerful non-French parallel to Les Hors-Nature: both novels use the brother bond as the site where the deepest questions of desire, will, and destruction are worked out, though Dostoevsky's frame is theological and Rachilde's is Decadent.
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Buy on AmazonThe Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's portrait of the Compson brothers and their different forms of damage is a twentieth-century American parallel to Les Hors-Nature in its treatment of sibling bonds as the primary site of psychological and social destruction: the comparison shows how the intense sibling bond becomes a vehicle for exploring the deepest levels of self-destruction.
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Monsieur de Phocas
by Jean Lorrain
Lorrain's 1901 novel is the closest male-authored parallel to Les Hors-Nature in the French Decadent tradition: both novels show a protagonist who constructs an obsessional relationship to another person that destroys both parties, and both use the dissolution of the self as a subject for forensic fictional analysis.
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Buy on AmazonLa Confession d'un enfant du siècle
by Alfred de Musset
Musset's 1836 confession of destructive passion is a Romantic predecessor of Les Hors-Nature's Decadent treatment of the same subject: the comparison between Musset's passionate suffering and Rachilde's clinical analysis shows the transformation of the literature of destructive love from Romanticism to Decadence across sixty years.
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Buy on AmazonBruges-la-Morte
by Georges Rodenbach
Rodenbach's 1892 Symbolist novel belongs to the same moment as Les Hors-Nature in the Belgian and Franco-Belgian fin-de-siècle literary world: where Rachilde uses forensic analysis, Rodenbach uses atmospheric evocation — the contrast in method shows the range of the late nineteenth-century Decadent and Symbolist treatment of obsessional attachment.
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