Nausea (novel)  

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"The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping over, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty lump, entirely raw, frightening me. Then I had this vision."--La Nausée (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre


"Roquentin has become a familiar of our world, one of those men who, like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters. . . . It is scarcely possible to read seriously in contemporary literature, philosophy, or psychology without encountering references to Roquentin's confrontation with the chestnut tree, for example, which is one of the sharpest pictures ever drawn of self-doubt and metaphysical anguish."--Hayden Carruth


"[It is] like a bruise or a secretion, like an oozing—and something else, an odour for example; it melted into the odour of wet earth, warm, moist wood, into a black odour that spread like varnish over its sensitive wood, in a flavour of chewed, sweet fibre."--La Nausée (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre


“I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.”--La Nausée (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre


"Dire qu'il y a des imbéciles pour puiser des consolations dans les beaux-arts. Comme ma tante Bigeois: "Les Préludes de Chopin m'ont été d'un tel secoursà la mort de ton pauvre oncle." Et les salles de concert regorgent d'humiliés, d'offensés qui, les yeux clos, cherchent à transformer leurs pâ̂les visages en antennes réceptrices. Ils se figurent que les sons captés coulent en eux, doux et nourrissants et que leurs souffrances deviennent musique, comme celles du jeune Werther; ils croient que la beauté leur est compatissante. Les cons."--La Nausée (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre

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La Nausée (1938) is a novel by Jean-Paul Sartre.

On the cover of one Penguin edition was The Triangular Hour (1933) by Salvador Dalí.

The Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.

It is widely considered one of the canonical works of existentialism. Sartre received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. They said he was recognized, "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." Sartre was one of the few people to ever decline the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution.

In her La Force de l'Âge (The Prime of Life - 1960), French writer Simone de Beauvoir claims that La Nausée grants consciousness a remarkable independence and gives reality the full weight of its sense.

It was translated into English by Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964).

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