The Vatard Sisters (Studies in Romance Languages)

"The Vatard Sisters brought Huysmans to the notice of the public and revealed him as a man who could paint word-pictures which put earlier practitioners like Gautier and Edmond de Goncourt in the shade…The novel is a story of two working-class sisters, but the main protagonist is Paris, suburban Paris, the Paris of railway stations, cheap restaurants and café-concerts…and the passages that describe the music-halls and crowds of the Avenue de Maine and the Boulevard Saint Michel, or the railway yard seen from the back window of the sisters' bedroom, have a visual immediacy…a kind of energy, a force of personality, which are utterly unusual in Huysmans' work…"
Anita Brookner in The Genius of the Future