I used to have a recurring thought, when lying in bed face-to-face with a lover, that there was no fathoming their separate consciousness, and that they might choose to do anything; they might choose at any moment, for instance, to use their freedom from my control and their teeth to chew off my face. When I told my girlfriend of this fear, she encouraged me to get on with reading Nausea, already.

I'm finding that Nausea is a book that is difficult to recommend to people. I start to explain that it's about a dejected historian who's hung up on his ex, and that he becomes increasingly alienated from the world around him and overwhelmed by the inherent meaninglessness of life, and my interlocutor's eyes start to glaze over. They begin to suspect that I'm the kind of person who casually uses words like interlocutor, and they decide that they would rather be talking to anyone else.

Perhaps I will not recommend Nausea to people, then. But I did enjoy it very much, and persist in my affection for Sartre.