Review: Nausea

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Apparently, this book was originally meant to be titled "Melancholia", and I think that is a far more fitting title to the book. The protagonist is definitely melancholic, probably depressed, and the whole book drips with melancholia, with sentimentalism, with pseudo-nostalgia. The writing as a whole seems way too sentimentalist. In fact, the narrator/protagonist says that himself - he comments in a passage that his latest writing is too sentimental and pompous! But he continues with it anyway.

Despite the over-sentimental style, the content itself is mostly a description of mundane everyday events and settings. Is this what existentialism novels are supposed to be like? An endless description of mundane events? As if to say everything is meaningful, and thus everything is meaningless? And then it has one or two significant events buried inside, for us to find and then re-cast the rest of the story, give meaning to everything that came before? So that the structure of the novel itself is a metaphor for life? If so, I don't like it.

At the end of the book, there is a bit of a discussion on existence, its value, the meaning of existence, and on the possibility that the meaning of life is given by history and collective memory. But the discussion is very weak, and obviously a red-herring, it doesn’t go anywhere. The whole book doesn't really seem to go anywhere. I really couldn't see why this is such a foundational book for existentialism.

One last thought: I was surprised by the number of mentions of pedophilia - there are at least 3 cases of it in the book, which is rather a lot considering the story has nothing to do with it.


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