Originally published in book form in French in 1887, Joris-Karl Huysmans' "A Dilemma" remains a particularly nasty little tale, a mordantly satiric and cruel account of bourgeois greed and manipulation that holds up as clear a mirror to today's neoliberalist times as it did to the French fin-de-siècle. Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous works-his 1881 "Against Nature," which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891 exploration of Satanism, "Down There"-"A Dilemma" presents some of Huysmans' most memorable characters, including Madame Champagne, the self-appointed Parisian protector of women in need, and the carnal would-be sophisticate notary Le Ponsart, who wages a war of words with the bereft pregnant mistress of his deceased grandson with devastating consequences. In its unflinching portrayal of how authoritarian language can be used and abused as a weapon, this novella stands as Huysmans' indictment of the underlying crime of the novel itself: a language apparatus employed to maintain the appetites of the ruling class.
Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of different literary movements: from the grey and grimy Naturalism of books like "Marthe" and "Downstream" to the cornerstones of the Decadent movement, "Against Nature" and the Satanist classic "Down There," the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite, "Becalmed," and his Catholic novels, "The Cathedral" and "The Oblate."