(Paris) The French writer Christian Bobin, who notably enjoyed bookstore success with The very lowdied at the age of 71, the publishing house Gallimard announced on its social networks on Friday.
He died “November 23, following a serious illness”, his publisher Antoine Gallimard said in a press release.
“Let’s read Bobin, he cures us of sadness and skepticism, he invites us to a quest for joy with his borrowed words of great sensitivity […] His smile, his joy, his humanity will be missed,” he wrote.
The author, who cared little for his reputation, regularly published short prose texts. Some have exceeded 100,000 copies, such as The very lowon Saint Francis of Assisi, in 1992. Others have remained confidential.
This fall, he had published a novel with Gallimard editions, red lily of the valleyand an anthology of “selected works” in the Quarto collection, The different regions of the sky.
“A poetic being, a generous solitary, Christian Bobin has offered us for nearly fifty years an exploration of themes that we all share: mourning, sensitivity to nature, the passage of time, intimacy and, always, the need for meditation “welcomed Friday in a press release the French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak.
Frédéric Beigbeder, French journalist and critic, had launched in 1995: “Bobin is, by far, the most famous writer of Le Creusot”, his birthplace in the center-east of France, to which he remained attached.
“I was born in a cradle of steel,” confided to AFP this fall this son of a professor of industrial design, while Le Creusot had housed the Schneider steelworks in the 19th century.e century. But, with him, no industrial novel, social realism, class struggle, on the contrary: a pointillist art, turned towards nature and the sky.
“I preferred to go towards what seems to ignore the passage of time: flowers, love in its first timidity, waiting, the beauty of a face, silence, the long duration… All these things that modern life gradually began to take us away, to rob us,” he concluded.