Paul Auster: “a great man”, “a great work”, “more than a friend of France”… Emotions after the writer’s death

He left behind a legacy of numerous novels, songs and films, as well as great admiration. American writer Paul Auster died on Tuesday evening, April 30, at the age of 77 from complications of lung cancer. “Paul died tonight, at his home, surrounded by his loved ones,” in New York, a family friend reported. The author, born in the state of New Jersey in 1947, was pushed onto the international literary scene by his The New York Trilogy. A writer respected in France, which he considers his own “another country”, he received the Foreign Medici Award for Leviathan in 1993.

Numerous lovers of his writing are paying tribute to him this Wednesday, May 1. Starting with the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati: “Paul Auster was more than a friend of France, a lover of its culture,” she wrote in a tweet. “Writer and translator, he did a lot to make French literature known across the Atlantic. Thoughts for his loved ones, family and friends. French culture has lost a great channel.”

“Cult writer”

Françoise Nyssen, the former Minister of Culture between 2017 and 2018, was moved by the death of the author in front of the microphone of France Inter, noting that it was not “I’m not really in the mood to talk about it.” Before adding: “But he was such a huge man that it must be repeated, made known and read again and again.”

For Discharge, looks back on forty years of human and artistic relationship.

The Cannes Film Festival also paid tribute to Paul Auster, who dabbled in cinema several times during his screenwriting career. He contributed to the film Smokewhich features lost souls gravitating around Brooklyn shops, and its sequel Brooklyn boogietwo films made with Wayne Wang.

“With the passing of Paul Auster, one of the most fiery voices in the city that never sleeps has died. The talent of this great American novelist, the author of forty books translated around the world – including the New York Trilogy and Leviathan – transferred to the big screen »announces the festival on Twitter. “Also a screenwriter, actor and director, Paul Auster was a member of the feature film jury in 1997. With great sadness to learn that he has left us.”

A talent clearly praised in the world of publishing. The house Actes Sud, which published all the works of Paul Auster in France, reacted in the morning to the announcement of the writer’s death, emphasizing “opportunity” that she had to count him among her authors. “Paul Auster is not, in the Actes Sud catalog, one author among others. His encounter with our publications – almost as unknown at the time as he himself was in his own country – dates back to Hubert Nyssen’s trip to New York in the mid-1980s. reminds the publisher in the press release. “Being his editor – or his editor, in this case Marie-Catherine Vacher – was an opportunity and became for Actes Sud a calling card that circulated among Paul Auster’s ever-widening circle of friends.”