Espaces blancs

A decisive text in Auster’s transition from poetry to prose, and his first book translated into French, White Spaces was written at the turn of 1978–1979, following a period of creative difficulty. Auster, then devoted primarily to poetry, attended a rehearsal of a dance class: the movement of bodies suggested to him a form of writing that could unfold without following a fixed plan, and it is this that the text explores — the relationships between gesture, speech and space. Auster has recounted finishing this text on the very night of his father’s death, in January 1979.

Published in English in 1980, the text appeared in French from Éditions Unes in 1985, before the French recognition of the novelist and the immense success of the film adaptations of his work.