The death of Paul Auster last April shocked the world literary community. “ You were America», Wrote its French editor, Marie-Catherine Vacher, in our columns. Enough to give an overview of the scope of the “ most European of American authors» and the void it leaves in the artistic landscape.
Siri Hustvedt experienced this disappearance in the most intimate way possible, since she had been married to Auster since 1982. In the days following the death, she reacted as an author, feeling the “urgent need to write “. This work should lead to an essay devoted to his relationship with Auster.
The intimacy of the blank page
« There is something in death that activates this impulse, in authors, to write», assures Siri Hustvedt in an interview with the German weekly The time . She had already experienced it herself after the disappearance of her mother, which led her to sign Mothers, fathers and othersa collection of essays on “the shifting boundaries that define human experience, including those thought to be immutable”, according to its publisher.
In France, this work was published in October 2023 by Actes Sud, in a translation by Frédéric Joly. Note that this same publishing house published the entirety of Hustvedt’s work in France, but a large part of that of her deceased husband, Paul Auster – his poetry was brought into French by Éditions Unes.
« I started writing these memoirs about him and me, about“We”a few days after his burial at Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, on May 3“, she explained toGuardian. « I didn’t “want” to write this book, in a way, I mainly felt the urgent need to do so. »
For the moment, this manuscript currently being written has 120 pages, gathered under the titleGhost Stories(Ghost stories). According to the author, the process of writing, using the blank page, “arouses an intimacy that does not exist in face-to-face dialogue with the person ».
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Siri Hustvedt remains aware that the exercise is nothing new for an author, but specifies that Auster’s death left her “scared: I read a lot about mourning since his departure“. In the register of introspective work post-disappearance of a loved one, let us cite in particularThe Year of Magical Thinkingby Joan Didion, which the American author wrote after the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, in 2003.
Photograph: Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster, facing Michelle Bachelet, former president of the Republic of Chile, in April 2014 (Gobierno de Chile, CC BY 2.0)
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