Nausea (1938)

This is a short book of only about 250 pages and as usual I decided to give it 50-100 pages and see how it went before decided whether to carry on with it or not.

I don't think I would necessarily call it a novel, it's a bit of a mishmash written like a diary. Some entries are quite short and to the point and some are very long and rambling. It basically details the thoughts of a man, Antoine Roquentin, during his time living in Bouville. While he is in Bouville he is carrying out research and trying to write a book about a historical figure. He has few acquaintances but no one that he would count as friend and feels that his life has no value to it. There is an ex-lover who comes back into his life after a long absence, but it is fair to say that she is no longer interested in him. Over the course of the book he veers into near insanity and this is really reflected in the writing.

I found the book very slow going, especially towards the conclusion where Roquentin is getting closer to losing his mind. For this reason it is a book that you really need to spend time with a go over everything in your head. There were some parts of the book which really jumped out and stuck in my head but as a general book to read, it's a lot of work. For this reason I thought that it was ok but honestly, no more than that. ( )

A book I acquired and grimly took out to read ("I'll do a few pages a day..if I can manage it") ..and read the whole thing in three days. And it's BRILLIANT, though I can't pretend I "got" all of it...and even as you finish it, you realise you could reread it and study it for years....
But as a bog standard, lowbrow reader...this is a pretty accessible work, considering the subject matter. In a diary, our narrator records his daily life. Nothing outstanding- he writes a biography in a library, mooches about, recalls an old love...
But the diary is purely a vehicle to get the reader contemplating existentialism. And here one has to try and slide into another dimension. Though many of Sartre's musings may well be familiar...Theyre the kind of things that occur to us but we never mention them. Theyre too hard to explain...
Ever stared hard at an everyday word and thought it looked ...weird? Looked at a photo of a distant place and thought "I was there once! At a specific time ...I'm not now." You look at a wave crashing...gone...gone where? A particular group of people coming together on the bus...theyll never replicate that pattern again. Photos of long-dead people...so alive...where are they? You do something wrong...if I could go back and re-live it, do it different....Time travel, death, the ephemerality of life...

Sartre does crank it up to visions of a Salvador Dali type of world by the end, and he'd pretty much lost me by then. I kept thinking one could make the jump from existentialism to religion, though I don't think that's what the author was aiming for.

I'm glad I read it. I shall keep it, along with two other challenging, must-try-it-again-one-day books (Kafka and "Linguistics: A Hallidayan Approach ") and MAYBE have another crack at it sometime. ( )

a godless french historian has a quarter life crisis. he takes walks and hangs about in cafes. later he goes to paris.

Oddly enough, I never finished Nausea. I just got sick of it.

I can't remember this. I must read it again. ( )