Nausea

This is why Veeky Forums has fallen. Nor feminim, neither redditors, just shitposters.

Please try to give a constructive criticism, lazy ass.

Read it when i was 20-25. Loved it. Felt like someone knew what i was going through. I want to read it again lately. (I'm 41 years old btw)

Read it, great novel, deals with derealisation really well

Never read it. Absolutely loathe the word "nausea" with all of my being. May look into it in the future if Veeky Forums genuinely thinks it's worthwhile.

>5 years to read a 100 page book

But the book ils really bad though. I read it with the good intention to get to know his literature.

I thought it was indeed boring, unoriginal, uneventful and boring. The quirky girl is ridiculus to the point of being a satire of dandyism without any counterpoint nor criticism, just plain agreement.

Let's not get started on the pedophile scene, which is an obvious ans overblown attempt at lashing out against the bourgeoisie's morality.

tl;dr ni literary merit

>I thought it was indeed boring, unoriginal, uneventful and boring

hur dur

His former girlfriend offers a co-occurring and collateral nausea to the narrator's own. When the narrator and his girlfriend were previously together they each had predicted meaning within their lives upon these various automatic systems -- he though the sense of adventure, she through the sense of these 'perfect moments' -- and each system was ultimately based on deferring meaning from the present moment into the future or the past.

The notion that these kind of existential solutions are unsustainable is what is being explored through the novel. The narrator suspects that there is an emptiness behind "the adventures" which he has based his life around having and the more he tries to defiantly grasp the 'real' moment where his "adventures" take place the more he looses the moment to the eternity of moments on either side of the phantom, pinnacle moment.

His girlfriend isn't Sartre displaying some form dandyism in order to make some trite social commentary or lack thereof. Her nausea is arising from her desire to crystallize meaning into these perfect moments, a desire which she pursues by being an actress in the theater, believing that any and all pain experienced in achieving these perfect moments is worthwhile because all experience is given value by these defining moments.

The problem isn't with the book, it is with you. You've obviously only given the work the sort of reading which is comfortable for you -- that being a facile social commentary type reading where the subjects within are figurative props for a bland exploration of the most obvious sorts of relatable interpersonal dynamics.

predicated no predicted

Well, I do disagree. I'm not saying that the philosophical concepts that Sartre wants to develop are not present, just that they are presented in a shallow and unaestethical way.
This critique also goes for the writing style; it is well crated, but the craft itself is so apparent, so impersonal, that it felt totally contrieved.

I really do think the book has no literary merit; and not because Sartre is stupid or talentless, but because in this book the literary form is subservient to his philosophy.

I guess aesthetic pleasure can be highly subjective, but i did not find any reading this book.

Also, does my point with the pedophile stands?

Also I was not saying that Sartre should have been criticizing dandyism; i'm just saying that their past relation is, to me, ridiculous, and it borders parody without even being mentionned as such. Hence my interpretation that Sartre wrote bad characters, intentionaly or not.

I can't remember if the self-educated man is made to be an imposter at the end or not. I want to say Sartre has the narrator idealizing him throughout his illness but then his entire routine being exposed as an inconsequential fact of his inner, sexual life. I don't think Sartre was about making morals one way or the other in the work. I'm sure there is some reasonably tidy tie-together for the self-educated man's role though.

I honestly don't hold Sartre in that much esteem and think some heavy-handed social moralizing would be quite at home in a lot of his work. Nausea is actually the exception for French existentialism as far as I'm concerned, and having only read it in translation I can't really say that much about the craft but I do think it holds up along most mid-20th century continental pieces of literature, especially when considered against The Stranger.

>some reasonably tidy tie-together
This is exactly what bothers me with the novel ; the architecture, the phraseology, everything seemed crafted to fit some kind of neat, straightforward literary agenda. I did not find in it any of the necessary poetic ambiguity that a good novel should have. But again, I realize it is a highly subjective criticism.

>Especially when considered against The Stranger.
I haven't read The Stranger since high school, so maybe I'm skewed, but it remains in my memory a perfect counterpoint to The Nausea. It holds itself on a separate level than its philosophical substrate, hence succeeds as a novel. Its depiction of depression provides way more emotional and existential weight to me.
What are your griefs with it?

Underrated post

I suppose it is nauseating to realize you dont entirely know what and where you are, or to then dwell on the what you know of what you actually are, made of and such, can befall one to feel oft queasy