About the book
Set in Bouville, a fictional seaport widely taken to be Le Havre, Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel takes the form of a diary kept by Antoine Roquentin, a former adventurer and melancholic intellectual who keeps to himself. He has lived alone in the town for three years, with no friends and little contact with family, researching the life of the Marquis de Rollebon, an 18th-century political figure. In the winter of 1932, a feeling he names the Nausea, a sweetish sickness, starts to intrude on almost everything he does, as the people and objects around him seem to lose their familiar qualities. Sartre's original title was Melancholia, and the novel has also appeared in English as The Diary of Antoine Roquentin.
David Heinemeier Hansson listed it among the books he read in 2018, arguing that existentialism cannot be grasped by stating its values and facts but has to be felt as an ambience.
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This book has 1 recommendation
David Heinemeier Hansson (Co-Founder/Basecamp)
Existentialists like Sartre are big on the idea that you can’t just relate a philosophical worldview by simply stating values, techniques, and facts. To understand existentialism, you must feel it. Breathe its ambience. It’s like a tonal curve for life. Yes, we can talk about highlights, shadows, and all the mechanical elements of that tonal curve, but you won’t become an artist just by knowing these mechanics. It goes much deeper than that.
So Nausea is a novel, which imparts the existentialist tonal curve. I’m only halfway through it, but I’m liking it a lot already. It’s not as wild or erratic as Notes from Underground, but it’s got that similar feel. That the narrator gives us a mirror to reflect in, and those reflections are novel because we’re outside the normal tonal curve.
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