Nausea

Nausea is basically Sartre taking the most unsettling question imaginable (why does anything exist at all?) and turning it into a prolonged nervous breakdown.

Antoine Roquentin is a historian living alone in a French town, working on a biography of an eighteenth-century aristocrat. Gradually, ordinary things start to feel wrong. A pebble, a tree root, his own hand stop seeming familiar and start seeming like things that simply exist, for no reason at all.

Roquentin starts to physically feel meaninglessness as nausea. Things aren't necessary; they just are. As he puts it: "Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance."

Going beyond the explanations of existentialism, the book is best when it focuses on things like Roquentin's contempt for everyone around him, his fixation on his former lover, his relationship with the Self-Taught Man, and his failing attempt to make history stable. But there are stretches where the philosophy gets repetitive.

Still, it's bleak without being hopeless. The question isn't "What is the meaning of existence?" but "What do I do once I realize nobody is going to hand me one?"

Nausea is a novel that makes philosophy something you feel. 4/5