Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (1938)

He stoops to pick up a pebble at the edge of the sea, means to skip it across the water, and finds he cannot: the thing in his hand has turned obscene, too solid, too there. So opens the diary of Antoine Roquentin, a historian washed up in a grey French port, watching the ordinary furniture of the world shed its names one by one, until a chestnut root in the public garden rears up before him as pure, naked existence, soft and black and monstrous, meaning absolutely nothing. This is the queasy vertigo Sartre named nausea: the discovery that nothing had to be, that you yourself are superfluous, that the tidy story by which a life seems to add up is paint brushed over a void. It should be unbearable, and very nearly is. Yet the book keeps one small light burning, a worn record turning in a café, a melody so clean it seems to exist as nothing around it does. You will not look at a chestnut tree, or your own hand, the same way again.