Nausea

One Tuesday morning, Antoine Roquentin picks up a stone on a beach and feels, for the first time, the thing he will spend the rest of the novel trying to describe and understand. It is not disgust exactly, and not fear. It is a confrontation with the sheer, brute, meaningless factuality of existing things — the way they simply are, without necessity, without purpose, without any of the human meaning we project onto them. He calls it nausea.

Published in 1938, Nausea is the novel that launched existentialism as a cultural movement and introduced the vocabulary that would define a generation of European intellectuals. But it is also something simpler and more immediate: a portrait of a man having what we would now call an existential crisis, rendered with a novelistic precision and psychological accuracy that makes it feel completely contemporary.

One of the essential philosophical novels of the twentieth century — and far more readable than its reputation suggests. Sartre’s ideas have never been more vivid or more accessible than they are here, in fiction. Robert Baldick’s translation is the standard English text. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.