Knappe setting: een gestrande wereldreiziger die zijn levenslot probeert te vinden door een dubieuze 18-de eeuwse markies te bestuderen; aanvallen van angst door de ervaring van het naakte bestaan, wat eigenlijk de zinloosheid van het bestaan zou moeten betekenen. Sartre blijft consequent met zijn eigen filosofie, maar mist daardoor de essentie. Na de ultieme walging-ervaring is alle spankracht uit het boek weg. Toch een knap literair document, met bijvoorbeeld meesterlijke knipogen naar Proust. ( )

i like this book because the narrator reminds me of myself more than anything else. ( )

How do you reconcile your own existence in a world without meaning or purpose? With the decline of religion in a modern world, it is a question that many non-believers will find themselves asking – and some may find answers in Nausea, an undisputed classic of modern philosophical fiction.

From atheism springs existentialism – the philosophical movement led by 20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre – and from existentialism springs Nausea, Sartre’s first major exploration of the ideas he became famous for. It takes the form of a diary; fittingly, a journal of philosophical ideas and their effects on the philosopher who realises them. As Sartre’s prose unfolds – at times measured and sure, at times frantic and epiphanic – we begin to build a picture of the novel’s protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, a historian living alone in the town of Bouville. He dines at the Café Mably, researches the Marquis de Rollebon at the library with his friend the Autodidact, observes his fellow citizens and reminisces about his past. The details of Roquentin’s life, however, are deliberately unimportant; as Sartre’s creation, he serves to explore ideas which are much more universal.

Roquentin suffers from attacks of what he calls ‘Nausea’ – a crippling sense of the utter superfluity and randomness of himself and the world around him. It is out of laziness, Roquentin supposes, that the world looks the same day after day. His world is one without order or rules, where anything could happen at any time. Turning his attention to the people around him, he analyses the myriad of meaningless constructs that humans create to facilitate a comfortable illusion of order and continuity. Past, future, memory, progress, wisdom, adventure . . . as these constructs fall away from him, one by one, the knowledge of his own unmitigated existence drives him slowly insane.

Nausea, then, is not only an exploration of Sartre’s existentialist ideas. It is a cautionary tale for would-be philosophers. Perhaps it is better, Sartre acknowledges, to be ignorant and happy, like the young people the Autodidact sees admiring paintings without any idea of their meaning, and appearing to enjoy themselves regardless. They must have been pretending, responds Roquentin – an injection of Sartre’s own dry, self-mocking wit.

Indeed, the debilitating angst of Nausea begs an inevitable question of the reader: how is it that these can be Sartre’s thoughts, Sartre’s beliefs, when Sartre himself was neither mad nor depressed? The novel carries all the marks of Sartre’s life and work. Its ideas are those of his later philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness. Its port-town setting is strongly reminiscent of Le Havre in Haute-Normandie, where Sartre wrote Nausea in 1938. Connections can be spotted, here and there, between the novel and Sartre’s life – like the Autodidact, for example, Sartre spent time as a prisoner of war in Germany. Long passages of the novel are devoted to mocking and criticising the constructions and trivialities of bourgeois life, in accordance with the beliefs that led Sartre to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature when it was offered to him in 1964. (These passages form the most uninteresting sections of the novel, as the insipidity of bourgeois life threatens to carry over to Sartre’s prolix discussions of it.)

Yet, for all his links with the tormented Roquentin, Sartre remained content with his life to the end. In his own words: The only thing that I truly like to do is to be at my desk and write, especially about philosophy. Philosophy for him was not a source of angst, but a source of enjoyment. How did Sartre alleviate the pain of his own existence?

The answers may perhaps be found in the final few pages of Nausea, when the novel justifies not only Roquentin’s existence, but also its own. As he listens to his favourite record for the last time, Roquentin is struck by the permanence of the melody, which does not, in itself, exist, but which nonetheless endures, even despite the scratches on the vinyl. Through their creation of music, Roquentin realises, the composer and singer have cleansed themselves of the sin of existing. Inspired, he resolves to do the same by writing a novel, which will be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence: the same novel that the reader now holds.

After all, what is literature but a medium for conveying ideas? Long after Sartre’s death in 1980, the ideas he conveyed will live on, and this is his justification for existing. Perhaps, then, Roquentin is not so far removed from Sartre after all. It is philosophy that has awakened him to reality, philosophy that has brought his world crashing down around him, and philosophy that will ultimately save him. ( )

for anyone who questions things, feelings, emotions that you have, yet don't understand why nor feel as if you should have them, but yet can't help but wonder why... why why why, this book is for you.

written in journal format, Antoine Roquentin supposedly hates his life, or is it just existence, the questioning of present, of the next moment to come... his extreme discomfort for existence creates thought-provoking and intellectually stimulating moments as a reader -- i found myself making notes, underlining passages...

if you follow his logic, his pulse, it will suck you in and absorb you...

i cannot give this book the justice it deserves, you should find out for yourself... but make sure to read in a quiet, dark and lonely place. ( )

Perhaps a little slow in the beginning, but rich in experiential and philosophical detail. It's satisfying to read a book that addresses primarily internal rather than external action and change, in which the narrator explores a dense inner life and struggles with themes of meaninglessness, purpose, memory and existence itself. The philosophy of existentialism presented here may not appeal to everyone; however, I think the fictive events presented are an important and insightful record of the kind of melancholy many thinking people experience during some part of their lives. Whether or not they come to affirm, like Sartre's narrator does, the effort of creative self-becoming through work and art, the book offers insight into some key philosophical concepts while retaining the emotional and mental atmosphere in which such ideas might occur.

There are interesting portions of this book; interesting enough to make it worth reading. As the first novel by Sartre, it is understandable that it be a treatise for his existentialist approaches. I have not studied philosophy, so I cannot quote you the meanings of existentialism (shy of the comic book snippets one receives in classes, books, and conversations among people who really don’t know what they are talking about). But everything I know (so little) and everything I’ve read indicates this is a pivotal piece. And, as I mentioned, there are very interesting concepts in here. Some I rejected out of hand; others I found resonated. And, while it was heavy slogging through a couple of parts (to be expected in a French book trying to expound a philosophy); overall it was not a difficult read. In all, this is probably not the best way to introduce yourself to Sartre or existentialism. However, if it is your first foray (as it was mine), you will find, if not an in-depth introduction, a nice peek into what it may mean. ( )

Read it in college for an Existentialism class, like you do...As a moody character study Nausea is actually quite good, but I just can't relate to the emotional tenor of Existentialism. The intellectual positions I've been able to glean—the absence of any inherent moral structure to the universe, and a correspondingly acute awareness of one's own agency—seem like fair descriptions of the way the world actually is, but these fill me with a sense of freedom, not despair. The famous bit near the end of the book where Roquentin is sitting in a park and has this sudden profound sense of the reality of a tree trunk in front of him—to an atheist, scientist like myself that sounds like it would be a joyful experience, an unvarnished glimpse of the big crazy universe we live in, but it bums Roquentin out. We're just not on the same page, I guess.

Young man looking for himself in himself, which turns out to be the wrong place at the wrong time. One of what, seven, autobiographies by this philosopher of Idiocy, the new Joy. Clueless. The one thing he had going for himself was Simone de Beauvoir. Maybe the one path he chose that was not the easy one. The Vichy episode is not well-known. Sartre's contribution (another footnote) to the Platonic riff on Meaninglessness, is the concept (it remained conceptual in Satre's finger-fingered hands) of "Acting". (No, Kierkegaard, not a Leap of Faith, just the Leap and Nothingness.) Now how hard is this for a young man to "figure out" in the vaccuum of His Own. (No, Heidegger, not reduced to Being and Nothingness.)

Some argue that existentialism is more of a feeling than a philosophy, and one could easily get that impression after reading Sartre’s novels. Sartre was not afraid to explore his philosophical ideals in different forms, and his Renaissance-man abilities in writing allowed him this freedom, even as a novelist. Nausea, in particular, is a collection of diary entries from one Monsieur Roquentin whose soliloquies personalize existentialism.

Existence without essence is naked, cold, detestable (like a bolbous rock easily reduced to pure, bare existence). To demand meaning, to turn inward, and to see Nothing is to feel nausea. “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” It is difficult to be a man, the knowing animal, who must tolerate the human condition, suffer with the idea of life’s absurdity. Dostoevsy wrote “Suffering is the sole root of consciousness”. More broadly, this novel is really an anthropocentric exploration into man’s struggle to accept himself and his epistemological limitations. ( )

Wikipedia: La Nausée is a novel by Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, written in 1938 while he was a college professor. It is one of Sartre's best-known novels.
The Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.
It is widely considered one of the canonical works of existentialism. Sartre got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. They said he was recognized, "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a farreaching influence on our age." Sartre was one of the few people to ever decline the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution.
In her La Force de l'Âge (The Prime of Life - 1960), French writer Simone de Beauvoir claims that La Nausée grants consciousness a remarkable independence and gives reality the full weight of its sense.