Fiction. Translated from the French by Robert Baldick. Set in late nineteenth-century Paris, this is the story of civil servant Jean Folantin, a man beset with melancholy induced by middle-aged loneliness, nihilism, and toiling for a wage that scarcely allows him to subsist. His days are composed of office drudgery; in the evenings he searches in vain for a decent meal. His nights are spent alone. Whether DOWNSTREAM is the political tale of a man's enslavement by poverty or, instead, a psychological tale of his reluctance to genuinely invest hope in anything that actually matters, it is without a doubt J.K. Huysmans in a foul and visionary mood.