Whether, from the viewpoint of literature, “La Nausée” was worth translating at all is another question. It belongs to that tense-looking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters – Barbusse, Céline and so forth. Somewhere behind looms Dostoevsky at his worst, and still farther back there is old Eugène Sue, to whom the melodramatic Russian owed so much. –Nabokov, Sunday, April 24, 1949 in The New York Times Book Review

Nabokov states that La Nausée “belongs to that tense-looking … type of writing”. If, as we may suppose, this type of writing did not end with the publication of La Nausée, who are its descendants? Bret Easton Ellis for example?

Although Nabokov derides two of my favorite authors (Céline and Dostoevsky), he shares my dislike for Sartre. From the same review:

Sartre’s name, I understand, is associated with a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy, and since for every so-called “existentialist” one finds quite a few “suctorialists” (if I may coin a polite term), this made-in-England translation of Sartre’s first novel. La Nausée (published in Paris in 1938) should enjoy some success.

Peter Lubin on suctorialism:

Suctorialist was first and last used (by Nabokov) in an April 24, 1949, review of a French novel for one who “reads and admires such remarkably silly nonsense as the ‘existentialists’ rig up.” An ugly word, an ugly idea, and we may leave it, along with that novel, back in 1949.

Some unrelated eyecandy:

In Consultation (1924) – Joseph Schippers

Death of Orpheus (1866) – Emile Lévy