Nausea

Description

“I’m leaving. I feel vague: I don’t dare make a decision. If I were certain I had a talent… But I’ve never—never—written anything of the sort. I’ve written historical essays, yes, although… I want a book, a novel, and there will be people who will read this novel and say, ‘Antoine Roquentin wrote it. He was a red-haired person who hung around cafés.’ They will think of my life as I think of that Negro’s: as something precious and semi-mythical.
A book, of course. At first, it would only be a tedious and tiring task. It won’t prevent me from lying, and I won’t feel like a being. But there must come a moment when the book is written, when it becomes philosophical, and I think that some of its light will fall on my past…

These notebooks were found among the papers of Antoine Roquentin and are published on these pages without any alteration or change. The first pages are undated, but everything suggests that they predate the diaries by a few weeks. They may… Written, at the latest, around the beginning of January 1932, during this period, Antoine and Quentin, after traveling to Central Europe, North Africa, and the Far East, had settled in Bouville for three years to complete his historical investigations into the Marquis de Rollebon.