It’s hard to love Nausea but easy to see why it’s a seminal work. Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist (?), is insufferable. He suffers through life, disgusted with his existence and existence around him. He wallows in the mundanity of being alive, and we get to (have to?) do it with him. Next to nothing happens as he moves from library to cafe, painfully detailing the world around him.

Which is the point. What makes it instrumental is that you feel seen. From the first person, a number of times, Sartre’s descriptions, asides, and observations via Roquentin are the same thoughts I’ve had and that, most likely, you’ve had. In a well-examined life, it is inevitable one would arrive at the paradox of being. And having experienced the void of what it means to be alive, the use of “nausea” to detail its procession from nowhere to comprehensive seizure is unerring.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that is all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been traveling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: You never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. … The time of a flash. After that, the procession starts again, you being to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.

Jean-Paul Sartre