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

Book Review - The Outsider by Albert Camus

 The Outsider by Albert Camus, translated from the French by Joseph Laredo

London: Penguin Books, 2000 (first published as L'Etranger in 1942, this translation first published 1982)

ISBN: 0141182504

Do we value Camus enough? I know that his books are very popular, and there is a lot written about him, but have we fully realised how accurately he predicted the society of today? Re-reading The Outsider is a reminder that modern life is alienating to individuals and fosters alienation of individuals one from another.

Meursault is a modern man - unattached, lacking passion, an outsider in his own life, observing and going along, but with no sense that he is able to take charge or direct his own life. When his girl Marie asks if he loves her, he states "it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." When she asked if he wanted to get married, "I explained to her that it really didn't matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married. Anyway, she was the one who was asking me and I was simply saying yes."

Camus sets up this book as portraying Meursault as someone who is completely truthful, and a person whose truthfulness leads to his downfall (Camus states as much in an afterword that is included in this edition). It is true that Meursault refuses to commit the daily niceties that most of us expect - he doesn't conform to the norms of crying at his mother's funeral, or saying what might be expected when his elderly neighbour loses his dog. This is all well and good, but the cold-hearted (a better term would be heartless) murder that is the centre-piece of this story is impossible to gloss as part of a wider story of truthfulness in the face of a conformist society. Meursault can't understand why people seem so agitated about his lack of remorse or feeling for what he has done, but Meursault seems oblivious to the scale and finality of the crime he has committed. 

This tension, deliberate or not, infects the mind of anyone who reads this book. Meursault's depiction of the banality and conformity of society is valid, but his inability to understand that what he has done draws the calumny of that same society is almost impossible for the reader to accept. The constant fug that Mersault describes living through (he is always too hot and stuffy, the sun addles his brain, he feels slightly sick) adds another layer of wooliness to the story - the reader feels that at any moment they might be suffocated by this novel, that the helplessness and hopelessness of Meursault will overwhelm even the society that sits in judgement of him.

In 2023, one also wonders about the racial aspect to this book. Meursault's "mate" Raymond beats his Arab girlfriend, the sister of the Arab that Meursault kills. Raymond gets off the charge of violence, with the implication that because he beat up an Arab woman it doesn't matter so much. The reader gets the sense that Meursault wonders why he has been given the death penalty, given that the person he shot was merely an Arab. In 1942 this aspect of The Outsider may have not been as noteworthy as it is today, but it adds another layer to what is already a dense story.

The style of this book (in this translation) is worth mentioning as well. The first two chapters, which set up what kind of man we are dealing with, his attendance at his mother's funeral and describing his daily life, are masterpieces of descriptive writing. The horror that develops in the second half of the book - horror at Meursault's crime, horror of his helplessness, horror of what is going to happen to him - is well-handled also. 

There is no doubt that Camus is worth reading - I do wonder if The Plague might be a better starting point for the first-time Camus reader, but The Outsider, although a short book, definitely lingers in the mind.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 by Victor Serge

 Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 by Victor Serge, translated and edited by Peter Sedgwick

London: Oxford University Press, 1967 (this translation first published 1963)

I have been meaning to read Victor Serge for many years - in my peregrinations through the literature of revolution and totalitarianism and the tortured history of the Twentieth Century his name crops up again and again (in fact it's generally accepted that he coined the word totalitarian). I've finally got around to his memoirs, and what a fascinating and depressing read they are.

Depressing in the sense that he catalogs in great detail the failure of Socialism in the first half of the 1900s, specifically the descent of the USSR into despotism and a police state, far from the hopes of those that fought the Revolution hoping for a worker's democracy.

Serge does not in this memoir really go into his personal life: he briefly describes his childhood in Belgium and France (his parents were exiled Russian socialists), and while we know from the book that he has a son, and that his first wife was eventually driven insane by the privations and persecutions Serge and his family suffered in Russia, they are the background to the wider story Serge wishes to tell.

While this is not a history of the Russian revolution, Civil War and times up until the Terror, it provides all the background information to such a history: wonderful pen-portraits of major and not so major figures in Russia during the 1920s, descriptions of the tightening grip of the Cheka on Russian society and government, and the increasingly difficult time to be weathered by those that did not absolutely conform to the Bolshevik line.

Serge never stopped fighting for the Socialism that he believed in - he went to Russia to help the worker's revolution, he joined with the Bolsheviks because he believed at the time that they were the only group that could deliver such a revolution. When the Bolsheviks went down the path of authoritarianism and repression Serge fought from within the system, as to his mind that was the only way he could make a difference.

He watched with dismay as the Bolshevik leaders consistently chose the path of repression over openness. Instead of worker's tribunals, the leadership chose unlawful detention. Instead of abolishing the death penalty, they chose to allow the Cheka to shoot people without trial or recourse to any mechanism for reprieve. Serge laments that the new regime had learnt from the Tsarist one, and continued many of the unjust activities of the past - as he writes "[t]he Russian Revolution, although led by men who were upright and intelligent, did not resolve this problem; the character of the masses had received, from the experience of despotism [i.e. under the Tsars], a fatal stamp whose effects were imprinted in the leaders themselves."

Eventually, Serge's opposition to such despotism made him a marked man, for "[o]ur great Marxists of Russia, nurtured on Science, would not admit any doubt concerning the dialectical conception of Nature - which is, however, no more than a hypothesis, and one difficult to sustain at that." Because Serge espoused this, he was hounded out of his positions, and sent into internal exile. He most probably would have been shot or died in a prison somewhere as happened to many of his friends, but because of his international fame, particularly in France where he was well-known as a novelist, he was eventually expelled from Russia.

That was not the end of his troubles - the Russians made it very hard for him anywhere he went in Europe. Pushed to the edges of the socialist movement, Serge just barely scraped by financially (although lack of money or the finer things of life never worried him), and when the Second World War came, he was forced to flee to Mexico, the only place that would take him. Although Trotsky (whom Serge often disagreed with) could not escape Stalin's vengeance in Mexico, Serge managed to spend his last years there in relative, if miserly, calm; writing this memoir before dying in 1947.

Serge's legacy is that of a true revolutionary socialist, and a clear thinker much in the mold of George Orwell. He was always working for the proletarians, and against the apparatchiks and place seekers. When he wrote this memoir he was hopeful that the War would finally bring about the socialism he was looking for - it didn't, but certainly, in the West at least, many people's lives have been improved by governments adopting some measures that alleviate the lot of the workers.

I finish this review with a quote that bears repeating again and again, for totalitarianism in all its forms continues to be a blight on the human race, and we need to keep fighting for freedom. Serge wrote that "Totalitarianism has no more dangerous enemy than the spirit of criticism, which it bends every effort to exterminate. Any reasonable objection is bundled away with shouts, and the objector himself, if he persists, is bundled off on a stretcher to the mortuary. I have met my assailants face to face in public meetings, offering to answer any question they raised. Instead they always strove to drown my voice in storms of insults, delivered at the tops of their voices."

This book is dense, but full of wisdom and pathos. If you are a student of the history of the Twentieth Century, I can recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, translated from the French by Lewis Galantiere

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966 (this translation first published in 1939, first published in French as Terre des hommes in 1939)

I recently reviewed Night Flight which was my first foray into Saint-Exupery, and was keen to get to one of his better-known works, and here we are. Saint-Exupery was a philosopher of the air, but much more than that a searcher for what is true in man. Wind, Sand and Stars describes Saint-Exupery's experience flying in Africa and South America, but what he is searching for in his writing is the spark that makes us human. He finds flying takes him above and beyond everyday cares and lets him touch the eternal, but it is  sharing that feeling with others that makes it valid.

Saint-Exupery states that "Truth, for any man, is that which makes him a man." When one accepts that, then all enmity can be cast aside. Even during war, when men fight, enmity can be cast aside - if both men are fighting for their truth, they are both men, and to be respected.

This is a hard thing to grasp, or even to understand - Saint-Exupery searches for it throughout this book. At first his comments on "normal" people (office workers and the type) seem derogatory, until the reader understands that Saint-Exupery feels a great sadness for them, that they never had the chance to become something more than they are, through no fault of their own.

This book is really a paean to brotherhood. Saint-Exupery found it in the fraternity of pilots with whom he flew the mails, and he observed it in the trenches with the Republicans in the early part of the Spanish Civil War. He tries to pull apart what binds men together in such situations, both the French pilots and soldiers, as well as the tribesmen who in turn befriended and massacred the French. He explores what it is to be free in the story of Bark, aka Mohammed ben Lhaoussin, the slave that Saint-Exupery and his comrades freed.

As he did in Night Flight, Saint-Exupery explores what it is to be human, while describing life on the edge of death. He comes to the conclusion that if you have lived, then death is not something to be feared for oneself, but only for those one leaves behind. This was the lesson he learned after nearly dying of thirst in the desert after a 'plane crash.

While his sentiments may seem a little of their time now in the twenty-first century, Saint-Exupery is still worth reading as a seeker for the truth. I enjoyed this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, with a foreword by Andre Gide, translated by Stuart Gilbert

New York: Signet Classic, copyright 1942 (first published in French 1931)

This is my first time reading Saint-Exupery (yes, I haven't even read The Little Prince!). Night Flight was not his first novel, but was his first success. The story is straightforward - a night flight of mail 'planes in South America, one of which is lost. Yet the story is not about that at all - it is about the power of human will, and the courage it takes to not only risk one's life, but to send other people to risk theirs.

Riviere, the driver of what was then a new idea - night air mail flights - spends his evening musing over what he makes other men do. Is it right to risk their lives for such a task? Is it right that he takes them from their wives and children to try and prove a point? Is it right to be the first to try something, and to keep pushing through disasters?

Saint-Exupery believes that it is - that human progress is more important than individual human life. It is something that humans have always done. His description of the bravery of individual pilots, of the tension of those in the head office, and the beauty and terror of night-flying in the 1930s are transcendent. This is such a short novel (125 paperback pages), and yet grapples with age-old human emotions, hopes and fears.

This might be the first of Saint-Exupery's works that I have read, but it won't be the last.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell