Recommendations
Books Like La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre
The founding existentialist novel — Roquentin and the nausea of contingency
Sartre's 1938 diary novel — Antoine Roquentin in Bouville encounters the nausea of contingency; the chestnut root that simply exists without reason, the jazz melody that seems to escape it; the foundation of French existentialist fiction.
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Buy on AmazonLes Mots
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre's 1964 autobiography is the direct response — La Nausée ends with Roquentin considering writing a novel to justify his existence; Les Mots is Sartre's later self-criticism of that aspiration; reading both together shows the development of Sartre's thought about literature over twenty-six years.
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Buy on AmazonL'Étranger
by Albert Camus
The most important contemporary comparison (1942) — both La Nausée and L'Étranger are novels of alienated consciousness in provincial France; Roquentin's nausea and Meursault's indifference are different responses to the same philosophical discovery; the comparison gives the range of what French existentialist fiction could do.
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Buy on AmazonHuis clos
by Jean-Paul Sartre
No Exit (1944) — the play that states most economically what La Nausée dramatizes in diary form; 'Hell is other people' is the theatrical condensation of the existentialist thesis about consciousness and freedom that the diary's extended phenomenological attention takes 200 pages to develop.
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Buy on AmazonL'Être et le Néant
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness (1943) — the philosophical work that systematizes what La Nausée dramatizes; reading the chapters on 'the in-itself and the for-itself' alongside the chestnut root scene in La Nausée gives the fullest account of what Sartre means by nausea.
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Buy on AmazonThe Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
Kafka's 1915 story of Gregor Samsa who wakes up as an insect is the most important predecessor — both Gregor and Roquentin undergo a transformation that reveals the absurdity of the ordinary world they were living in; the comparison shows the Central European and French approaches to the same experience.
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Buy on AmazonÀ la recherche du temps perdu
by Marcel Proust
Proust and Sartre have a complex relationship — both are novelists of consciousness and time; but where Proust finds in the involuntary memory a form of salvation from contingency, Sartre's Roquentin finds nausea in the permanence of the past; the comparison gives the full range of French literary responses to the problem of time.
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Buy on AmazonThe Trial
by Franz Kafka
Kafka's novel of Josef K. condemned without reason is the most important parallel for the experience of a world without comprehensible rules — both Josef K. and Roquentin live in worlds where the ordinary logic has dissolved; the comparison gives the tradition of the European absurdist novel before Camus.
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Buy on AmazonL'Immoraliste
by André Gide
Gide's 1902 récit of Michel's discovery of radical freedom at the cost of his wife's life is the most important French predecessor — the existentialist hero before existentialism; the tradition from Michel through Meursault and Roquentin to later heroes of freedom is the central tradition of twentieth-century French fiction.
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