A review by demonxore
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

dark reflective slow-paced

3.5

I like this book. It isn't life-changing for me, but it does resonate with me pretty well. The only reason I give it 3 stars is because it's more "meh" than others I've recently read, including Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (which is a great book to read in the quintessential existentialist set along with Nausea). I highlighted a lot of passages and will transfer them here another time; I really just wish I had read this when I was younger. I certainly have felt (and still feel on occasion) the selfsame anguish poor Antoine Roquentin does, especially when he thinks and behaves in contradictory, mercurial ways. This book is one that gains momentum under its own weight and becomes more engaging towards the end. In fact, most of the action happens in the last 40-odd pages, so if you've found it boring at the outset, give it a chance and finish the thing before you judge unfairly. It's not even 200 pages so even if you hate it, the investment is minimal. 

Next up in the same vein is Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, and sometime soon I'll grab a copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness.