The New Divine Comedy

A novel as divine as Dante's Divine Comedy and as diabolical as Goethe's Faust by Bedrettin Simsek, the banned author of Turkish literature. In 1998, when it was published under the title "The Discussion of an Atheist and a Cleric", Bedrettin Simsek and the publishing house were sentenced to two years in prison for insulting religious values. This sentence was suspended on the condition that they would not commit the same offense again. Bedrettin Simsek was then ostracized from the literary world. Fearing the reaction of readers or punishment, publishing houses closed their doors to him. In the end, he turned into a cursed writer whose name no one ever mentioned. Reminiscent of a comic version of Dante's Divine Comedy and its antithesis, the work begins with an intellectual conflict between a dying atheist and a cleric, and then takes the reader on a dizzying journey through the landscapes of purgatory, heaven and hell. By creating a post-mortem in which the sinners enter heaven first and the good can fall into hell, the book deserves the title "The New Divine Comedy". The work not only reveals the genius of Bedrettin Simsek, but also gives the reader an opportunity to understand the essence of the ban imposed on him for years in the literary and publishing circles in Turkey.