i'm feeling nauseous

As one of my "Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes" suggests, I have started to read a book outside of my coursework. In fact, I bought Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre a few weeks ago but had to read Our Father San Daniel by Gabriel Miro for class. And that tome took up a bit of my time.

Nausea, in case you don't already know, is about an Antoine Roquentin who is writing a book about a forgotten historical figure and he is camped out in a village/small town because it's where the best archival information on his subject is. The novel is actually Antoine's diary. I know this doesn't sound very exciting (and it isn't), but Antoine gradually determines that the world is devoid of meaning and everything is completely random, so he must find a way to live in this world with purpose. According to the back cover* of the book, Nausea is "an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times--existentialism." I am only about 45 pages in, and Antoine is only just starting to have his bouts of nausea--a sort of hallucination--where he feels sick to his stomach and anxious based on his observations of society. The fits end up clearing up things for him, helping him come to this conclusion about the world.

I hope I did not sound condescending there, describing the premise of the book because I don't know much about it either. Neither the Waterstone's on campus nor the one in town had Misfortune by Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding), so I decided to wander through the fiction section. I scoured every shelf. Since I don't normally read fiction, it is amazing to me the sorry state of fiction today, to see all these serial novels, like the ones about women detectives in African huts or the ones that are historical romance novels about the Tudors. (I think every character from Elizabeth [1998] must have his or her own novel.) In short: nothing really interested me.

Until I found this one. Yes, I have heard of Sartre before, and I knew he was an existentialist, but I have never read anything by him. I couldn't name anything he'd written before finding Nausea in my hands. The topic interested me, but I never intended to buy something on existentialism that day. (I made a choice; how existentialist of me!) I say this because "existentialism" has always been a word that floats in and out every now and again, and before you can call yourself something (or deny it), you have to know SOMETHING about it.

I'll let you know about the novel as it comes.

*I should note that the front cover attracted me, too: Salvador Dali's Little Cinders from 1927.