En Route

Durtal has been to the edge. He has investigated Satanism in Paris, attended Black Masses, and emerged from the experience spiritually homeless - unable to accept what he witnessed and equally unable to return to the comfortable materialism of modern life. Now, ten years later, something is shifting. He finds himself drawn - against his better judgment, against his entire formation as an aesthete and a skeptic - toward the Catholic Church he abandoned in youth.

But wanting to believe and being capable of believing are not the same thing. And Durtal, with his hypersensitive contempt for the mediocre and his lifelong devotion to art over doctrine, is not the easiest candidate for grace.

En Route follows Durtal to a Trappist monastery in the south of France, where he spends ten days in retreat - attending the liturgical offices, wrestling with decades of accumulated sin in the confessional, and discovering, to his own bewilderment, that Gregorian plainchant and the prose of the medieval mystics speak to him more directly than anything the secular world has offered.

Published in 1895, En Route is the extraordinary second novel in Huysmans's Durtal cycle - the book in which the author of À Rebours, the bible of French Decadence, turned his ferocious aesthetic intelligence toward the question of faith. Condemned for obscenity, praised for its spiritual honesty, and recognized immediately as a literary masterwork, it remains one of the most searching accounts of religious conversion ever written: unsentimental, often very funny, and finally, devastatingly sincere.

By Joris-Karl Huysmans. For readers of À Rebours, Là-Bas, and the literature of the soul.