En Route

This is the first new translation of En Route since C. Kegan Paul’s expurgated original of 1895, which censored or completely cut sections dealing with Durtal’s sexual obsessions. Restoring these cuts serves to heighten the drama surrounding Durtal’s existential crisis, and gives the novel a perspective that has hitherto been lacking for English-speaking readers. En Route was J.-K. Huysmans’ first novel after his conversion to Catholicism and effectively opens a trilogy of novels detailing the spiritual journey of his alter-ego protagonist, Durtal.

The novel caused a sensation on its first publication, not just because of the surprisingly frank descriptions of Durtal's obsessive sexual thoughts, but also because Huysmans’ was still best known as a disciple of Zola’s Naturalist school and few expected this frank and detailed account of a conversion from a writer who only a few years previously had scandalised the Parisian literary world with his Satanic novel of 1891, La-bas.

'En Route is interesting in many ways. It is unique among the other books of Huysmans in style no less than in spirit. Here he has wholly put aside the studied bareness and hardness of expression that characterise his earlier method, and the descriptive passages glow with colour and abound in strange felicities of expression...'
The Bookman, 1896

'En Route... has been received with something very like enthusiasm both here and on the Continent, and it is not difficult to understand why. Any conscientious piece of work which deals cleverly with religious problems is certain of attention. A coterie may be interested in a particular problem, a clique may wax enthusiastic over certain aspects and forms of thought; but the great central fact of life – the struggle between good and evil – is of tremendous importance to us all.'
The Academy, 1896