Being and Nothingness
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season928 pages, about 19 hours: the length of 2.9 typical books on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbOne reader quit after the introduction; another stalled a chapter in during a first attempt and returned to finish it years later.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesSarah Bakewell recommends Nausea, on the shelf at 258 pages, as reaching the same ideas as Being and Nothingness through one character’s crisis.
The case for it
on the café waiter
“amazing novelistic passages. Most famously, there’s the example of the café waiter.”
Nigel Warburton · Five Books, 2018 on the Richmond translation
“Sarah Richmond has now produced a meticulous, elegant translation which appears to be error free”
Jonathan Rée · London Review of Books, 2019 on the look
“I perhaps think I most agree with in the text is ‘the look’.”
four stars · a book blog on radical freedom
“The philosophy of freedom puts the individual back in the centre”
Christine Daigle · Philosophy Now, 2005
The case against
on the jargon
“a bejewelled robe he dons in order to appear more weighty”
three stars · a book blog on bad faith
“rejection of all compromises as ‘bad faith’ is a sure recipe for nihilism, and self-destruction.”
a book blog on the repetition
“Some of it reads like a man arguing with himself.”
a book blog on the introduction
“such an indecisive and confused beginning, as well as some puzzling conclusions”
a Substack review
