At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. Because that's still a thought.' Will there never be an end to it? I mustn't think that I don't want to think. If I could keep myself from thinking! I try, and succeed: my head seems to fill with smoke. How serpentine is this feeling of existing, I unwind it, slowly. But though I am the one who continues it, unrolls it. The body lives by itself once it has begun. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up.

It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns: 'I have to fi.

They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. “I jump up: it would be much better if I could only stop thinking. 'One of the very few successful members of the genre 'Philosophical Novel'. If you enjoyed Nausea, you might like Albert Camus' The Outsider, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. His most well-known works, all of which are published by Penguin, include The Age of Reason, Nausea and Iron in the Soul. Sartre famously refused the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 on the grounds that 'a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution'. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was an iconoclastic French philosopher, novelist, playwright and, widely regarded as the central figure in post-war European culture and political thinking.

A seminal work of contemporary literary philosophy, Nausea evokes and examines the dizzying angst that can come from simply trying to live. The book chronicles his struggle with the realisation that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices. Nausea is both the story of the troubled life of an introspective historian, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times - existentialism. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated from the French by Robert Baldick with an introduction by James Wood. Jean-Paul Sartre's first published novel, Nausea is both an extended essay on existentialist ideals, and a profound fictional exploration of a man struggling to restore a sense of meaning to his life.

Nausea the book