Nausea
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First published in 1938, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (La Nausée) is a landmark of twentieth-century French literature, a novel in which the ordinary world becomes suddenly strange and unsettling. Told through the diary of Antoine Roquentin, a solitary researcher living in the provincial town of Bouville, it follows his growing estrangement from familiar objects, social rituals and the reassuring stories people tell themselves about their lives. As Roquentin’s sense of reality begins to unravel, the simple fact of existence takes on an almost unbearable immediacy.
Part philosophical inquiry, part psychological portrait, Nausea explores contingency, freedom, isolation and the fragile meanings we impose upon the world. Sartre gives abstract questions a vivid, unsettling physical presence, transforming a café, a park bench or the root of a chestnut tree into occasions for profound disquiet. The novel established many of the concerns that would define Sartre’s existentialist thought, while remaining a distinctive work of fiction: intimate, darkly comic and attentive to the strangeness of everyday life.
From the book
“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
On Nausea
“What is striking in La Nausée is that remarkable fictional gifts and the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered.”
— Albert Camus, “On Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée”