Book Review - Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated from the French by Robert Baldice

London: Penguin Books, 1990 (first published in French in 1938, this translation first published 1963)

ISBN 0140181806

My first foray into Sartre, and Sartre's first novel. A novel that I'll mull over for quite some time. A story of angst, a struggle to find the meaning of - or at least some meaning in - life. The claim on the back cover of the edition I read is that this is Sartre's first foray into the ideas and philosophy that became known as existentialism. The novel takes the form of a diary of Antoine Roquentin, who is temporarily residing in Bouville where he is undertaking research into a biography that his is writing of an aristocrat from the Revolutionary era.

Antoine is going through a crisis, through which he is stripping away the layers of his life one-by-one. As the diary moves on he becomes less and less sure of his place in the world, of his views about his fellow man and society more generally, and finally about the physical world itself.

He grapples with these questions via interactions with people in the town, in the cafes, the library and on the street, and with the physical buildings, parks and trees that surround him. What does it mean to be a person - if the present is the only thing that actually exists, how can a human life have a trajectory or meaning (we create ourselves and the world through storytelling).

But what is it that we are telling ourselves? How can we be sure of anything when the past doesn't exist or things are merely things and cannot hold other meanings? "Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance." The book, and Antoine, seem to be heading to the most nihilistic of endings - Antoine even moves beyond the idea of suicide, as to do the deed is just as meaningless as anything else.

The climax of the diary is Antoine meeting his former girlfriend Anny in Paris. She has come to the same conclusions about life as Antoine, and is resigned to "mere existence". Antoine hopes for some sort of reconciliation, as during the meeting he realises that he has in fact missed her presence, but their meeting concludes with Anny explaining how that part of their life is over. Having long since realised that his book is pointless, Antoine returns to Bouville one last time before moving to Paris, and, in what I see as a deliberate ironical twist, begins to think about writing a different sort of book, a book very similar to the one the reader is reading...

Nausea is, I think, both a product of its time and its author. Sartre's existentialism - Antoine's ennui and disaffection - spring from the trauma of World War One: what is meaning after such slaughter, what meaning can the past have and what does the future look like when the old certainties no longer hold? It is also a young man's book. Many of Antoine's insights are not revelatory to someone older, so I wonder if some of the dramatic impact of the thought in this novel was lost on me. I actually bought this for my eighteen year old son who has an interest in philosophy, so I will be interested in his reaction once he has read it.

As someone who has read quite a bit of modernist fiction, it is interesting that so many different people in Britain and Europe were working with fiction in a similar way at a similar time - it really does reflect a change in how people (middle-class people to be sure) viewed themselves, society, and the world at large. In my opinion Nausea fits into that tradition.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell