Nausea

Rating:
Summary: Go to Camus then come back
Review: Not as effective as THE STRANGER by Camus, or NO EXIT by Sarte himself, this narrative seems at first out of joint, but then one begins to think why. A great, thought-provoking text that leads to Pynchian paranoia, only different :)

Rating:
Summary: A forceful portayel of the Atheistic Outsider
Review: A brilliant working of Sartre's feelings, and intimately real for some of you. The story of NAUSEA is one of Antoine Roquentin, the atheistic Outsider unnaturally disgusted by himself, man, and the world, dynamically "aware" of the existence of things apart from their appearances and names. Then, how is it that things are? He lives a limbo, between Heidegger's notion of "inauthentic" and "authentic" living. He watches life as from a detached lense and can not remove himself from it, though wishes to. He tries sex without loving the girl and, as consequence, gives up. He wants a kind of Masonic brotherhood of man, but comes to shy away from people he can not stomach. His diary comes to recognize the manner in which persons delude themselves from a stale living by the pretension of having, on the surface, happiness and depth. He (and Sartre) denounce religion, mysticism, immortality, without properly looking into the evidences for them. For my own part, I found this book the artful antithesis to my conviction of the immortality of the whole of life, and the Being of God. So, then, I remain unconvinced by the materialism of the novel. I am, however, deeply impressed by the high intelligence of it, (some of the observances of Sartre I have had myself), as for instance the moment when Antoine considers the forgotten newspapers lying upon the ground, cluttered, and representing the past. He wants them remembered somehow (they are as nothing now, like himself), used,or put away in the garbage. He cannot do so, for fear others will look at him oddly. I wish people to read this book, however difficult at times it may be. But, Sarte's pessisim of life having "no meaning" is not, I feel, a token of truth. (Study Viktor Frankl). "Happiness" is not always a delusion, as Sartre posits. There are moments of small wonder, love, and mystery that can not be reduced to delusion. Read the book, for it's careful observances, but bear in mind that Roquentin and Sartre were willingly miserable and possibly neurotic. And, for existential novels, consider Witold Gombrowicz.

Rating:
Summary: Maybe I should learn French.
Review: Sartre is a very sensible philosopher despite his silly political whims. Nausea is a fine effort in its rare genre, but of course it's no Notes from the Underground. The intended effect and narrative structure is appropriate, but it simply falls short of being a novel. Sartre unveils some essential existential truths, but to my dismay it failed to capture my interest, no matter how much I tried. It took me over a year to read this short book. It dragged on so long that I almost found meaning in life before it was over.

Rating:
Summary: Complex and raw but not a classic
Review: I read "Nausea" wanting to see Sarte's other work besides his plays and philosophy. This Novel is both challenging but doesn't quit hit the bulls eye and has a poor ending for the point Sarte's trying to get across.

"Nausea" is about a writer Antoine Roquentin who keeps a diary of his day to day life and catalouges his emotions and explores them deeply. In the beginning of the novel, Roquentin throws a rock into a river and feels something extreme but doesn't know what it is. From there he explores his own existence and soul. Later on he finds powerful truths about life and existence.

One problem I had with this book is that the main charector is so empty and lonely to begin with, I knew he would be horrifed with his own existence and gives us no hope. However I loved this novel for Sarte's ideas on existence, life, people, art, innocence, loneliness etc... and its worth reading for this factor even if there are some flaws and the ending isn't really awarding.

I read one reviewer's comment on this book on Amazon( Sorry I don't have the reviewer's name) which I really felt true, which meant something like 'If Existence is meaningless why didn't Sarte kill himself?'. Existentialism is some of the most true writing in the world but you can't believe it to an extreme. If existence is meaningless then you've just wasted life in vain of others. However I'll spare you my philosophy and conclude this review by saying this novel is very much worth reading but is not an existentialist classic. Check out Camu's "The Stranger" and Sarte's "No Exit" for classic existentialist works.

Rating:
Summary: My bible
Review: This book made a deep impression on me when I first read it in high school. Recommend to me by a friend, I found myself experiencing the nausea Sartre's main character experiences. I think this is why some people talk about this book being boring or mindless. It is in a sense. Sartre will take you there. But I couldn't put this book down. This was a familiar feeling to me and I wanted to know what was going to happen to this man. The ending of the book is the only slight flaw. Not that you don't pick out the resolution but because it is a little light and Sartre's mechanism for the main character's resolution is a little cheesy. At any rate it still works and as a result the thoughts are in my mind often.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and Misleading
Review: This book is incredible at exposing many of the escapes humankind hascreated to avoid the most primal of facts: that the world ismeaningless. This is a very liberating, and yet onerous belief, because it does not free us from creating meaning for the world. I would not read this book however,and take everything as whole, because in my opinion, Sartre does a good job of exposing many of the escapes humankind uses to hide the truth, but to include Love within this category is to make humankind unredeemable. If you think you might believe the same, I recommend reading Albert Camus afterwards or instead of Sartre. END

Rating:
Summary: Should Hve Been Called "Tedium"
Review: This book is Sartre's attempt to show that existence is absolutely disgusting, pointess, useless and so on. And it is also an absolute fake because the author behaves as though he believed nothing of which he was writing. Sartre uses his protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, to sequentially explore a variety of options that are traditionally have been thought to give meaning to life, and he in turn, shows how shallow each and every one of them are. Love, work, sex, etc. But this sort of novel is rather troublesome -- one sort of knows that one is being hoodwinked the whole time, that the author has an ax to grind and that the whole story was being constructed in order to prove his point with literature. But we all know that literature can be used to lend credence to one's own point of view (whether correct or not) and does not necessarily tell one the way that things really are. In that sense, this is an ideal sense of propaganda. If Sartre really believed what he was writing, he would have committed suicide rather than bothering to wrote a book. I mean, once the author comes to the point where he discovers that life is pointless, it seems rather absurd to say "and to continue . . .". But this is not the case. There were few philosophers more vigorous and productive than Sartre, so his very life serves as an example of how his nihilism was contradictory. He repeatedly fails to make use of Roquentin's experiences of "adventure" or even anger. In other words, there are solutions that are inherent in the situation, which Sartre repeatedly fails to make use of. He tries to demonstrate the "nothingness" of human consciousness byt showing how vacant people are when there is no other humans to serve as a stimulus -- but all the time, the very act of writing the book gives lie to what he was attempting to show! He shows quote clearly that his consciousness os far from being as vacuous as he tries to show in his novel. Also, if he had not erroneously reject Husserl's idea of the transcendence of the ego, he would have at least had a more productive starting point from which to build upon. Also, any form of meaning scheme's other than the "here and now" are rejected out of hand. Any sort of Gestalt ideas are rejected without so much as an attempt to reason why they might be false. Also, the whole book seemed like just so much whining and self-pitying tripe. Heidegger's notions such as "authentic existence" are never made the slightest use of, although they provide more in the way of solution that Sartre ever would (his communism seems a poor solution to any sort of philosophical problems that he raised). The book was a good attmept to justify a flawed philosophy, and the reading style is tedious at best. Although barely a hundred pages long, it seems like three hundred because all seems so dead in the book. Also, for those genuinely interested in psychology, do recall that Sartre's experiment in taking mescalin was done shortly before he wrote this book, and with Sartre's overall personality type, the effects of the drug on him may have well resulted in the sort ot meaning starvation and depression that Sartre seemd to have been suffereing from at the time he wrote this book. Such reactions to the drug were not that uncommon and may provide clues for future philsophers.

Rating:
Summary: magnifico cuento sobre nuestro vacio
Review: la nausea es la historia de la nada, del nihilismo que no nos permite creer en nada y nos mortifica cuando estamos vacios.el protagonista es atacado por su preocupacion constante de no ser mas que una pieza en un mundo que no tiene sentido. esto es mas que buena literatura. es filosofia de altura...

Rating:
Summary: Allatta B. Ess
Review: I find that alot of people write the same type or reviews which say absoloutely nothing other than, "Like this book because youre supposed to." I can see how it delves pretty deeply and well into some of he questions of existence and motivation, but it is too... FRENCH! Too much of this self-wallowing pity makes us think of the guy writing the book, and I'm not talking about bographical info, I'm just saying you lose the fictional thread, the art gets stale almost. I hated this book, I still have not even finished it because I fall asleep after four or five pages. Yes, it was impactful, it was physically and mentally depressing, and so for sheer power, I think it gets at least 3 stars, but mien kamph and the communist manifesto were moving pieces of writing, that doesn't nescessarily make them good, though. Perhaps I'll read it at another less tiring time and it will all click, but if you want some drama from sartre, read some of his plays which are excellent, especially "The Flies."

Rating:
Summary: Stunning
Review: Nausea is one of the most powerful literary experiences one can find. The form of the novel enables us to enter into Sartre's brilliant (and warped)mind. There is a sort of inexplicable energy that keeps on pushing you to read further and further- it is impossible to put this book down. The work can be appreciated as a novel for the quality of the story, but can also be understood as a powerful argument for Sartre's existentialist philosophy. He takes the reader through different alternatives to realizing that one's knowledge of one's existence makes one sick or creates nausea. Common escapes such as glorifying the past, the hope of relentless self-improvement,placing faith in love, are all explored and dramatically proven by Sartre to be false delusions to the truth that human existence is sickening.