À vau-l'eau Reading Order

À vau-l'eau (1882; translated as 'Downstream' or 'Drifting') by Joris-Karl Huysmans is a short novella — barely 80 pages — that distils the essence of Huysmans's Naturalist period into a single pure complaint. M. Folantin is a petty Parisian civil servant with a small salary, a cold lodging, and an obsessive need to eat a decent meal; the novella consists almost entirely of his daily search for a restaurant that will give him food that is not disgusting, and his daily failure. Each restaurant turns out worse than the last — the meat is off, the wine is vinegar, the waiter is insolent, the other diners are appalling. Folantin does not have a plot; he has a condition: the world systematically fails to provide the minimum comfort a civilized man requires, and there is no recourse. The novella reads as pure Schopenhauer — the will is thwarted at every point, and the only honest response is to acknowledge that this is simply what existence is. Huysmans wrote it as he was exhausting his patience with Zola's Naturalist programme (he found it too optimistic about social reform) and working toward the turn that would produce À rebours two years later: if the world cannot be reformed, perhaps it can be aesthetically escaped. Folantin cannot escape; Des Esseintes tries to escape; and the Catholic novels accept that there is no escape except God.