Joris-Karl Huysmans, Le converti littéraire (2022)

Having just completed his masterpiece "A rebours", Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) begins a cycle of four novels which retrace the successive stages of his slow and painful conversion to the Catholic religion. This unprecedented enterprise raises its procession of unresolved questions expressed by the character of Durtal, the author's alter ego, a writer like himself. To spiritual and moral questions: what to do with your own life? What choices do we have to make to fulfill ourselves as human beings? Added to this is a question specific to the profession of writer: how to describe in the form of a novel a conversion, a unique and tortuous event that is inexpressible? In this research, the one who "entered Catholicism as if into a gutter" (Léon Bloy), places Art in front of faith.