“Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.
His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which ‘spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time—the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.’
Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (though he declined to accept it), Jean-Paul Sartre—philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist—holds a position of singular eminence in the world of French letters.
La Nausée, his first and best novel, is a landmark in Existential fiction and a key work of the twentieth century.”
“It is the most enjoyable book Sartre has ever written.” —The New Yorker
”The best-written and most interesting of Sartre's novels.” —Atlantic Monthly
”With Nausea, Sartre has succeeded magnificently—and horribly—in extending the realm of the novel to the outermost reaches of naked self-examination”—New York Post