Drifting

This is a Ulysses of the eatery, whose Odyssey, limited to voyages from one dish in which rancid butter surrounds uneatable meat to another, is heartbreaking, touching and despairing." -- Guy de Maupassant in Le Gaulois The misfortunes of Jean Folantin, a downtrodden clerk working for the Ministry of the Interior in Paris, form the subject of J.-K. Huysmans` blackly comic novella, Drifting (a vau-l`eau). At first glance, Folantin`s problems seem to be a world away from those of Jean Floressas des Esseintes, the aristocratic anti-hero of Huysmans` Decadent classic Against Nature, written just two years later in 1884. But the two men share more than just a first name: like des Esseintes, Folantin is in the throes of an existential crisis: alienated from a Paris undergoing rapid modernisation, the pace of social change leaves him feeling out of place, impotent, a small cog in an impersonal commercial world. Through the distorting lens of Huysmans` dark sense of humour, the dyspeptic Folantin is transformed into a modern-day Ulysses, and his tortuous quest through the streets of Haussmann`s Paris to find a capable housekeeper and a decent meal reaches its conclusion in one of the most daring anti-climaxes -- literally speaking -- in the whole of nineteenth century fiction. This new translation by Brendan King includes, for the first time in English, a contemporary profile of Huysmans` life and work in which the author plays both interviewer and interviewee, and which was published pseudonymously for the journal, Les Hommes d`aujourd`hui (Men of Today) in 1885.