400. Nausea

Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
1938
Around 180 pages

400! There's nobody I'd rather celebrate with than the OG party animal, Jean-Paul Sartre. I'm quite the expert on nausea myself, having never done anything exciting without immediately throwing up afterward. Leave it to the maestro of misery to put this feeling into the bleakest possible context.

Antoine Roquentin lives in Bouville, with no friends or family. He is in Bouville to finish his research on a political figure, but he acquires a low-level nausea feeling that prevents him from enjoying anything in his life. Then he starts to doubt his own existence, because existentialism is a very on the nose concept.

Sartre is a quote machine, I particularly enjoyed his observation that three o clock in the afternoon is too early or too late to do anything you want to do. Only somebody who has experienced deep depression can fully communicate how insufferable the mundane can be. Even so, he has a Wilde like wit that makes his comments humorous, in a macabre sort of way.

Here's to another 100! 

RATING: ****-

Interesting Facts:

Albert Camus was a fan of the novel, although he felt that the descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel were not well-balanced.

Started when Sartre was still in military service.

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