My Big Apartment

Winner of the prestigious Prix Medicis and a bestseller in France, My Big Apartment is a humorous and ironic look at the serious subject of growing up. Always accessible but never facile, Christian Oster's books tell of the endless human quest for love and equilibrium in the world. Oster's gift is to make this timeless theme new through deadpan humor, a slyly cerebral style, and a deeply ingrained sense of melancholy. 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 much more than access to his home. Yet through a true comedy of errors Gavarine ends up finding everything he was looking for, in a way he could never have expected. 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 the translator of numerous books, including Eric Chevillard's On the Ceiling (Nebraska 2000) and Claude Simon's Le Jardin des Plantes, for which Stump won the 2001 French-American Foundation Prize.