" A powerful and outstanding work." Gustave Flaubert ?The Vatard Sisters brought Huysmans to the notice of the public and revealed him as a man who could paint word-pictures which put earlier practitioners like Gautier and Edmond de Goncourt in the shade?The novel is a story of two working-class sisters, but the main protagonist is Paris, suburban Paris, the Paris of railway stations, cheap restaurants and café-concerts?and the passages that describe the music-halls and crowds of the Avenue de Maine and the Boulevard Saint Michel, or the railway yard seen from the back window of the sisters' bedroom, have a visual immediacy?a kind of energy, a force of personality, which are utterly unusual in Huysmans' work?? Anita Brookner in The Genius of the Future 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 in 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.(Brendan King's translation was selected by Beryl Bainbridge as one of the best books published in 2001 in The Independent).La-Bas is the first of four novels about Huysmans alter ego Durtal.
