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Summary: Readers Beware
Review: This is a book for the mentally stable. Nausea embraces and defines existential beliefs, and in light of this, is an overly cynical book. To truly understand Roquetin, one must embrace his mindset and existentialism, even if it is only temporary. This can lead to a depressed state and dispair and dissatisfaction with their environment. One must view the world through the descriptiveness Sartre is so famous for. If you can survive an existential outlook long enough to finish this book, you will be delighted with the end of the novel, were hope is reinstated into Roquentins world. Although a single definition for existentialism is impossible, this book will offer a indepth analysis of how existentialist belief applies to what we percieve to be reality. On the whole, an excellent book.
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Summary: The Greatest Book Written in Our Time
Review: Although it's an extremely difficult book to get through, the concepts which it enforces are immaculate. True, you read a page and then have to think for a little while, but if you can grasp it, than you will appreciate fragments of the greatest mind of the millenium. These are really basic things we take for granted, things, which are necessary and will help any person willing to struggle with his existence, and the existence of the world.
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Summary: nice idea, but he obivously wasn't concerned with readiblity
Review: The whole existentialist angst thing is great, it really is, and this novel is a very effective presentation of existential ideas. However, it has to be the most boring thing ever written. Driest prose I ever did read, though I assume it was partly the translastion.
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Summary: Really Sick
Review: Sartre is a world famous existentialist of the times, and I think this wonderful novel really brings precision to the word "absurd". Objects are not what they seem... and physical sickness is due to his realisation of the absurdity of existence. What do you thinK??? READ THE BOOK.
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Summary: Great Novel!
Review: Nausea and Essays in Existentialism are, in my opinion, the best places to start learning about Sartre's philosophical views. I think these texts are more accessible than Being and Nothingness.While reading Nausea I got the impression that Sartre described a more pessimistic view of our condition than in his later writings. In Nausea he seems to be saying that there is no meaning to our existence, while later he will say that we choose the essence or meaning of our existence ourselves, by the acts that we continuously perform.
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Summary: A tale of man faced with the absurd.
Review: Antoine Roquentin is an author who gradually comes into a realization of the absurdity of man's being in the world. The reeling, writhing, ceaselessly undulating sense of life and the world occuring all around him without purpose is Nausea. Roquentin's struggles with Nausea become all-consuming, disallowing him even to complete his book on the Marquis de Rollebon. His only hope is to reconcile with Anny, his former lover, whose gaze paralyzes him. Unable to reconcile, Roquentin does not give up, but decides to continue to live in a world without God or meaning. In the existential mode, this continuing struggle is the only thing any of us has to look forward to. An excellent novel, one which lays out fictively the primary tenets of Sartre's "Being and Nothingness".
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Summary: The way life is
Review: The book changed my life
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Summary: Lean and trim existentialism by sartre
Review: One of the books that Ive read more than once. Its a book I read out of boredom and found it being better than anything I had read before that. Great book.
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Summary: if you like novels . . . skip this one!
Review: I have to say this is one of my least favorite novels of all time. In fact, as you may be able to tell from the reviews below,it's not really much of a novel at all, but a philosophical treatise written in diary form. Now, I don't have a problem with that, in and of itself: for example, I love Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the first half of which is devoted to expounding the Underground Man's philosophical views. No, the problem with this book is that it's boring! Sartre's character's "nausea" seems very studied, the angst of a man who's read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and decided that fashionable alienation is the way to go. I know that existentialism was all the rage twenty or thirty years ago, but now that it has become passe and the hype is all over, we can see a book like this for what it is: tedious and self-indulgent. (At least Camus was a talented story-teller.) And the punchline to the whole thing is that Sartre's conclusion is actually pretty sentimental: if I recall correctly, his protagonist discovers solace in listening to a Jazz record. Ah, the simple things in life! By all means, listen to a jazz record - or even a Spice Girls record - instead of wasting your time with a phony book like this!
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Summary: [Nau]sea-sickness
Review: I am all at sea, the Greek sea, here on the island of Rhodes. To my left, Jean. To my right, Paul. Between them a hyphen--myself reading the horizon line. Before us, waves. Within us, waves. Between each wave a period, a period of doubt. Does my stomach turn and then the page, or does the page turn and then my stomach? (Queasy to say, hard to write.) Waves of doubt rise up from the belly of the beast little either/or house in the whirlwind and lash my tongue until I confess the past within whose navel I lie (and, lying about, lie about lying) curled up with a book (see above, below, and side to side)whose cover Dali persists--from time to time immemorialized--in illustrating with a dead horse whose saddle is a bent clock whose fiures total the number of ants that feed upon your need to heed the right to know that, umbilically speaking, the wrong chord has been struck dumb as a forgotten scholar's mis-entry into Greek history. Picked free of lint and Lent, the navel (mine and the world's, twin origins separated by girth) sounds the alert, and all hands join hands, kneading nothig, being nothing, except, perhaps, the body of the text--fat, fatter, fattest on the bloc of type black as pitch and toss the sun, all balled up. [Hey, you, Colossus! Give us a little ouzo, will ya--no, make that a small glass of sea-water bloodied by, with, in and through tomato juice. Merci et/and mercy. And, now, please, a new page fresh for the messing.)
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