Bookland

Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism-that’s The Festival of Insignificance.

The incomplete manuscript of The First Man, which Camus had referred to as “the novel of my maturity,” was found in a mud-spattered briefcase near the wreckage of the car in which Camus died in January of 1960, when he was forty-six. Partly a novel of childhood and partly an epic narrative of his beloved Algeria, The First Man was intended to re-create Camus’s homeland– then still a colony in a traumatic struggle for independence– for the mainland French.

Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families. There’s a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a ‘clean freak’ and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly naïve mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building. When the trash at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth. By turns comic and tragic, this is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.

Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough…”