À rebours by J.K.Huysmans

À rebours (translated into English as "Against the Grain" or "Against Nature") (1884) is a novel written by the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans.

It is a novel in which very little happens; its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation.

À rebours contained many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature.

(from Wikipiedia)

J. K. Huysmans, an important figure in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, exemplified a style of homosexuality at a pivotal moment in the emergence of a gay identity.

He was born Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans on February 5, 1848, in Paris, the only child of a French mother and Dutch father. He earned his degree under a private tutor, studied law at the University of Paris, and worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained for thirty-two years.
A cosmopolitan man of refined taste and sensibility, Huysmans admired the descriptive writing of Charles Dickens, but practiced a poetic novel, a form known in France as the prose poem. This genre, which typically emphasized sensation and an elaborate or exotic setting, was perfectly suited to his elegant style and rich vocabulary.