Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre

Category: Literature
Language: English
Keywords: existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre Literature

Written by Jean-Paul Sartre
Read by Edoardo Ballerini
Format: MP3
Unabridged

Sartre’s greatest novel and existentialism’s key text, now introduced by James Wood, and read by the inimitable Edoardo Ballerini.

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form, he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which “spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.”

Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (though he declined to accept it), Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist, holds a position of singular eminence in the world of French letters. La Nausée, his first and best novel, is a landmark in existential fiction and a key work of the 20th century.