My Big Apartment

Winner of France's prestigious Prix Medicis and a bestseller in France, Oster's My Big Apartment is a humorous and ironic look at the serious subject of growing up. Always accessible, but never facile, Christian Oster is a writer searching for love and equilibrium in the world. Although hardly the most daring theme, Oster-through deadpan humor, fastidious and thoughtful writing, and a genuine melancholy-makes it seem new. Gavarine, the gentle but immature protagonist of My Big Apartment, is ambitious only in the search for love. When he loses the keys to his apartment he loses and a whole lot more than access to his apartment. Yet, through a true comedy of errors Gavarine ends up finding, in ways he has least expected, everything he is looking for. Though in some ways a wry romantic comedy, the language in My Big Apartment is unfailingly rich in implications and there is always more going in this story than meets the eye. At once unapologetically sentimental and overtly intellectual, Oster's writing belongs to that particular strain of French literature in which seriousness and jest, or passion and the cerebral, fruitfully coexist without effort or contradiction. Christian Oster lives in France and is the author of eight novels in addition to a number of pseudonymous detective novels and children's books. Jordan Stump is an associate professor of French at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of Naming and Unnaming (Nebraska 1998) and translator of numerous books including Eric Chevillard's On the Ceiling also published by the University of Nebraska Press.