Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Benchmark November 22, 2007
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
As soon as the summer holidays started I got on with the weeks of welding and tinkering necessary to bring my drawings to life. By August I had successfully turned my brother's school-loaned trombone into a fully operational bicycle - something akin to a recumbent bicycle with back supporting seat and horizontal pedalling position - I even made sure of re-routing the trombone's mouthpiece to use as a horn in traffic. I had realised my drawings and doodles drawn during school lessons, but felt deep in my heart that I knew the machine wasn't finished yet - why ride a trombone from John O'Groats to Lands End, when you can fly one across the Atlantic - that was it, I was on another mission, a mission to make my trombone house a propeller engine and bare wings.
 What is nausea August 20, 2007
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
Nausea is Sartre's first novle ,Maybe also is the most successful novel because this novel contains all his later philosophy ideology .What is the nausea?It is a discomfortable feeling when Roquentin faces the chanciness and unknowability of the world ,Also the meaningless existent ,human dissimilation and absurd reality come into being nausea.When I read this book I feel gloomy and pressimistic,Campared with Camus's novel Nausea is more stream-of-consciousness,My view about the chanciness and unknowability of the world is very different with Roquentin,I think just the chanciness and unknowability of the world make our life more brilliant and beautiful .....
 I just can't shake this feeling. July 31, 2007
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I am sad to agree with "professorkeitch" a reviewer below, If this wasn't by Sartre I probably would have never read it, but it is by Sartre. This certainly is a good book and an excellent step towards existentialist thought. Well worth reading. Frankly Sartre could have written a VCR manual and we'd still read it. However we can't forget that he's not the be all and end all, Camus, Nietzsche, Kafka, Dostoevsky, they're all good but Sartre's one of the best.
The first building block of an amazing philosophy June 9, 2007
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is the start, in fictional terms, of the existentialist explosion. It may not be so polished as the later 'Roads to Freedom' trilogy, but it remains a key text. philosophically this book is fascinating, as a novel it is still interesting. Do not be put off by the other reviews as this, in essence, is part of what existentialism warns us against-trying in vain to understand the minds of others, to think we can know what, for example, they would like. Ironic or what?
"Existence is what I'm afraid of..." April 11, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
"Antoine Roquentin is not dead... raped by existence from behind, he begs for mercy." Nausea is one of the few successful examples of a novel which is simultaneously a philosophical essay. I suspect the reason for this success that it's absolutely bloody hilarious aswell, indeed, perhaps the funniest thing I've read.
How to summarise it for you? The parable of Roquentin runs;
"There was a poor fellow who had got into the wrong world. He existed like other people in the world of municipal parks, bistros, of ports and he wanted to convince himself he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of paintings, behind the pages of books, behind gramophone records. And then, after making a complete fool of himself, he understood, he opened his eyes, he saw that there had been a mistake; he was in a bistro, in fact. He sat there, utterly depressed and thought `I am a fool.'"
Roquentin, the anti-hero, is not here to be liked or sympathised with in any way. But we cannot escape the fact he is pushing himself further and asking more questions of reality than most of us have, and which we are obliged to look into for ourselves to avoid `bad faith'. It is only in the face of all the quivering, pullulating mass of existence we can recognise, as the introduction points out, that, "the self is nothing, has no meaning, though it is the source of all meanings", and that any answer could only ever be partial, could only ever be a gesture in the face of this oppressive freedom-to-be. Find this difficult? It drives Roquentin mad; he runs through the streets boggle-eyed, arms in the air, shouting "watch out, something is going to happen!" Genius. Buy this absurd masterpiece now.
|
