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[...] I thought about Annelise’s life – and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether ‘stylish’ or ‘sexy’, most likely ‘stylish’ in her case. Either way, it was a complex calcul…

The debate took place on a Wednesday, which wasn’t ideal: the day before, I’d bought an assortment of microwave Indian dinners and three bottles of red wine. A high-pressure system had settled over Hungary and Poland, which prevented the low-pressure system over England from moving south; across co…

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 …