'One of the very few successful members of the genre 'Philosophical Novel'. If you enjoyed Nausea, you might like Albert Camus' The Outsider, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. His most well-known works, all of which are published by Penguin, include The Age of Reason, Nausea and Iron in the Soul. Sartre famously refused the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 on the grounds that 'a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution'. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was an iconoclastic French philosopher, novelist, playwright and, widely regarded as the central figure in post-war European culture and political thinking. The essay is still thought of as a form so capacious, so ill-defined, so anti-definition, that it becomes a backdoor for novelists to escape the novel nausea of what Smith calls Bad Novels (those in which all plots are ‘conventional’ and all characters sentimental and bourgeois, and all settings bad theatrical backdrops, wooden and.

A seminal work of contemporary literary philosophy, Nausea evokes and examines the dizzying angst that can come from simply trying to live. The book chronicles his struggle with the realisation that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices. Nausea is both the story of the troubled life of an introspective historian, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times - existentialism. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated from the French by Robert Baldick with an introduction by James Wood. Rather than give into despair, the inspirational music he hears on a jazz record both convinces him to confront the bare existence of things and write a novel. Jean-Paul Sartre's first published novel, Nausea is both an extended essay on existentialist ideals, and a profound fictional exploration of a man struggling to restore a sense of meaning to his life. This reliance on artistic creation to understand oneself becomes Roquentin's ultimate cure to his Nausea.

Novel nausea