J. K. Huysmans - O Castelo do Homem Ancorado

The book is permeated with dreams, delighting in the description of the most delirious forms of incommunicability, the drama of the living man who eats and is eaten.

"Single, misogynistic, with a bitterness stemming from the routines of the alpaca-sleeve at the Ministry of the Interior, this is how J.-K. Huysmans was perceived during his thirty-three years of literary life. Highly acclaimed in prose, there was a legend close to it of an audacity with which he entertained, at the tables of Montmartre cafés, a discourse where the ironies and frustrations of celibacy intersected. In his Livre des Masques, Rémy de Gourmont records this in one of these conversations: 'He invented the most daring metaphors to translate sexual experiences and concerns, and the dirtiest ones too. His books are chaste, if we compare them with the conversations he animated.'"

In literature, where he left his semi-invented Flemish name (his real name was Charles Marie Georges Huysmans [Paris, February 5, 1848 – Paris, May 12, 1907]), drawn from an illustrious lineage of Flemish painters, he exemplified a remarkable mastery of language. And with this "painted" phrase, which he intended to feel as a metamorphosis in writing of the Flemish brushstroke, he sought to take up arms for "naturalism"—almost an obligation, a price demanded by his close relationship with Émile Zola.

[...] In 1887, within a few months, he published Un Dilemme, a novel that was nothing less than sooty, and this En Rade (which literally means simply "anchored," but the Portuguese title complicates things, for aesthetic and commercial reasons, calling it The Castle of the Anchored Man). His inspiration still lingers on a border that doesn't openly declare itself open to Satanism, but is clearly bathed in its reflections.

[...]
"The Castle of the Anchored Man" is, however, a strange marriage. It forces the shadow of a Gothic setting to understand itself with a naturalistic anecdote of urban boredom. The author's habitual celibate discourse now runs through dreams with a Baudelairean outline; he questions himself with anguished neurosis about the natures of the dream world.

Aníbal Fernandes