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The obvious answer is: with great difficulty. Indeed, En rade, which follows À rebours, is a disappointing book. How could it not be? And yet if its faults, its air of stagnation and slow decline, never quite overcome our pleasure in reading it, this is thanks to a stroke of genius on Huysmans’ par…

After Myriam left, I kept to myself for more than a week. For the first time since I’d been made a professor, I didn’t even feel up to teaching my Wednesday classes. The intellectual summits of my life had been completing my dissertation and publishing my book, and that was already more than ten ye…

‘No, not depressed. In a sense it’s worse. You’ve always had this weird kind of honesty, like an inability to make the compromises that everyone has to make, in the end, just to go about their lives. Let’s say you’re right about patriarchy, that it’s the only viable solution. Where does that leave …

[...] I watched the hypotheses flicker across her sharp old features. You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model airplanes.

[...] He’d almost always invite me for a drink – usually mint tea in the Paris Mosque, a few blocks from the university. I didn’t like mint tea, or the Paris Mosque, and I didn’t much like Steve, but still I went. I think he was grateful for my company, because he wasn’t really respected by his col…