Sign-In
Cart
En Route: A New Translation
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 6 2026
Pages: 316
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.79 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.
Also from
Dufrit, Jean
Also in
Fiction Anthologies
On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings
Pirsig, Robert M.
Pirsig, Wendy K.
Hardcover
James Weldon Johnson: Writings (Loa #145): The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man / Along This Way / Essays and Editorials / Selected Poems
Johnson, James Weldon
Hardcover
Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stoker, Bram
Shelley, Mary
Paperback
Sez I to Myself: The Collected Essays of Frank and Malachy McCourt
McCourt, Malachy
McCourt, Frank
Hardcover
Here in New England: Unforgettable Stories of People, Places, and Memories That Connect Us All.
Allen, Mel
Paperback
The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Euripides
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Paperback
Learn Russian with Beginner Stories: Interlinear Russian to English
Gettys, Serafima
Van Den End, Kees
Hyplern, Bermuda Word
Paperback
Obvious Adams -- The Story of a Successful Businessman: New Business Edition
Updegraff, Robert R.
Paperback
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays, and Reviews
Poe, Edgar Allan
Hardcover
Bookin' in the Big House: What I Learned Leading a Women's Prison Book Club
Devoto, Pat Cunningham
Paperback
Japanese Folktales for Language Learners: Bilingual Legends and Fables in Japanese and English (Free Online Audio Recording)
Sato, Eriko
Sato, Anna
Paperback
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, volume 1
Cubas, Cristina Fernández
Pedraza, Pilar
Fager, Anders
Paperback
The Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio (Facsimile Reprint)
Randall, E. O.
Randall, Emilius Oviatt
Paperback