Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre's 1938 debut novel takes the form of the journal of Antoine Roquentin, a thirty-year-old historian who has settled in the fictional French port town of Bouville to finish a book on an obscure eighteenth-century aristocrat. He has money, time, a public library, and almost nothing else. Then ordinary objects, a pebble on the beach, the seat of a tram, the root of a chestnut tree in the public garden, begin to make him physically sick. Roquentin slowly realizes that what he is feeling is the raw, unjustifiable existence of things, the way they go on being there without reason or meaning, and that the same thing is true of him. Sartre wrote the novel before the existentialist label had attached itself to him, but it is the most readable summary he ever gave of the philosophy that would dominate postwar Europe, and it is funnier than its reputation suggests.
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Antoine Roquentin, a French historian in a small port city, keeps a diary as he is overcome by a sudden, physical revulsion at the contingency of existence. The book is the founding text of literary existentialism.
Nausea was written by Jean-Paul Sartre and originally published in French as La Nausee in 1938. It is widely considered one of the foundational existentialist novels alongside Albert Camus's The Stranger.
Nausea is dense with philosophical reflection and structured as a journal. The events are minimal; the interior is everything. Most readers either embrace the existentialist mood or set the book aside.
Nausea is a standalone novel by Jean-Paul. Satre, not part of a series.
Nausea is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
