Jean-Paul Sartre - A Náusea

After long adventures from North Africa to the Far East, the French writer Antoine Roquentin settles in the provincial town of Bouville, far from family, friends, everything – except himself and the sensations and feelings provoked in him by people, objects, and daily events.

Nausea, in the form of an intimate and impressionistic diary, tells his story, marked by the constant presence of "a modest happiness, a nauseating little happiness" that will ultimately condition all his actions, or lack thereof. Through Roquentin's efforts to understand his own life and his surroundings, Jean-Paul Sartre constructs here, in what was his literary debut, an analysis of the problems of human existence, immediately establishing him as one of the most important names in existentialist philosophy.

Originally published in 1938, this remains one of the most famous texts of 20th-century French literature, translated here by António Coimbra Martins.