Reviews with content warning for Pedophilia - Nausea

Reviews tagging 'Pedophilia'

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

16 reviews

spicycheesecake's review against another edition

challenging mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Mid!!! *slaps the back of Sartre's head*

Yeah. This book was not my cup of tea, not in the slightest. I guess it kind of reminded me of 1984, which I also was not a fan of. It's the books where they go on and on and on about the least exciting of things. Roquentin talks of his hands a lot, his face, other people's faces and body structures. Like, okay... so what? Would not recommend reading this book at face-value, or "for the fun of it". It is not fun.

However, from the philosophical perspective, it definitely feels like a good portrayal of someone who is first-handedly experiencing and converting to the concept that "existence precedes essence". I was lucky enough to not have to go through these realizations myself. Thank God for philosophy class. I think to read this book, you already need to understand some of Sartre's ideas, because it is so, so, so hard to read this book without knowing anything about the author. I would not recommend this book to someone who doesn't already know Sartre's take on existentialism. Maybe watch a couple YouTube videos first.

I found a lot of the story to be forgettable. I think the only few scenes I remember were 1) The Self-Taught man is exposed as a pedophile, 2) The Self-Taught man and Antoine go out for a meal together and the S-T man talks of his humanist ideas, 3) Antoine reads the letter from Anny, 4) Antoine meets Anny and they "argue".

Oh yeah, I didn't like Anny and Antoine's relationship. It felt like your usual least-favourite-married-couple quarrels. Ugh.

While I didn't like any of the characters - not even Antoine - I still think all their differing personalities were required for Antoine to dig a little deeper into himself. Antoine seems borderline judgmental, in the way that he will notice a lot of things about people, but he's very neutral when talking about it. Which is a good setup for when he talks about his own features. I felt like it implies that Antoine isn't necessarily critiquing himself, but rather he just notices what his body is like. He doesn't think it's good or bad, it's just there (Except his hair. I think he's proud of his hair. I liked his hair hehehehe). But this all plays in to how he notices non-facial features too. There's a lot of talk about his hands and the items he holds.

Now that I've finished the book, I see now that a lot of the story was about mere existence (this should've been obvious to me lolololol). I still relate this book to 1984, because I don't like how relatively important topics are approached in SUCH a boring way. But I can't help but think that Nausea was a pretty good depiction of someone who is realizing that life IS meaningless. I think the ending was well done. Antoine goes on his own way to discover France and all that jazz, he is looking for his essence. Nice!

I think Sartre has a habit of using hard to understand language, but it wasn't as apparent in Nausea. The language in "Existentialism Is a Humanism" is a million times worse, so I'm glad that Nausea was relatively easy to keep up with.

OVERALL, boring! But feels like an accurate and in-depth representation of "Existence precedes essence".

Content Warnings