Novel
Nausea
La Nausée
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1938
Synopsis
Antoine Roquentin, a historian who has long travelled, has settled in Bouville, a port town, to write the life of an eighteenth-century aristocrat, the Marquis de Rollebon. One day, picking up a pebble at the water's edge, he feels that objects have changed for him, and he begins a diary. The unease gradually spreads to the most ordinary things, in the café where he takes refuge as in the library, where he observes a regular whom he calls the Self-Taught Man.
Context
The manuscript, at first titled Melancholia, was refused by Gallimard in the spring of 1936, then accepted the following year. Brice Parain, who became its editor, asked for cuts, notably in the passages judged too crude, and Gaston Gallimard proposed the final title. The novel appeared in 1938. Its author wrote it in the years when he was teaching philosophy in Le Havre, which the town of Bouville transposes; the name of the latter evokes mud.
Who it is for
In the form of a dated diary, begun in January 1932. No philosophical knowledge is required to read it.
Prizes and reception
In English, the novel appeared under the title Nausea, translated by Lloyd Alexander in 1949, then by Robert Baldick in 1965 at Penguin.
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