Tuesday, January 15, 2008

La Nausée


This book was one of the very first paperbacks I ever bought. The Sartre classic seems these days to belong to another age. This is the 1965 Penguin Modern Classic with the Dali cover that was still being used in 1972 and I remember this seven year period of my life as being the time when the world changed forever. I was living in London at the time and had a French girlfriend who was also very much into Sartre and Chanel, a combination that was irresistible. As I said in another post on Cookie Mouse
"No book was ever more seminal in my development and as I return to it again over forty years later I realise what a profound effect Jean Paul Sartre had on both my thinking and my unconscious mind. Like an individual archetype he stands colossal in my memory and in my mind's eye. The English Penguin edition was my most prized possession and when I later learned French it became the paperback I used to pose with on the rive gauche. Avec Gaulloises, naturellement! It so impressed the first love of my life, Josette, that she asked me to a party in London and I got my first bottle of Chanel Pour homme for Christmas, 1968."
It amuses me to think that "la nausée" is the second most popular search keyword for my blog. Is Sartre still so popular or are a lot of French speakers not feeling very well at the moment?

4 comments:

chalky said...

Strangely enough Jean-Paul Satre is on my French calender today. I was given a calender about places of historic in France for Christmas by my new French family and today is St Tropez, Simon de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. There is a short description in French on each day about the location and my French husband is trying to help me learn French so makes me read it to him! :-) Please don't ask me to translate any further...

Chalky

Unknown said...

Cool! Synchronicity maybe?

chalky said...

I'd love to be able to tell you what my french calender is telling me today but husbando isn't around and all I can work out is that something is happening between September and November -might be birds migrating at Le Port de L'Aiguillon?? Hmmm

Unknown said...

Well you have till September to work it out!