Downstream

Présentation de l'éditeur Downstream, the shortest and most autobiographical of Huysmans' novels, is the perfect example of what the French naturalists wanted a novel to be. This dark and mordantly comic masterpiece of everyday pessimism about a Parisian clerk seeking spiritual contentment is the perfect introduction to the pleasures of Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), whose exquisite style is ironically the most perfect remedy for any reader's taedium vitae. Biographie de l'auteur Joris Karl Huysmans was born in Paris in 1848 of Dutch parents. He died on May 13, 1907, the last of the little band of Naturalists which included Zola, Daudet, and the Goncourts. Huysmans was the preeminent Parisian writer. Huysmans worked, like the hero of Downstream, as a low-level clerk in the Ministry of the Interior.