Anita Brookner, author of Hotel du Lac is dead – Le Figaro

DISAPPEARANCE – The author of The Hotel du Lac , Booker Prize in 1984, was also an art historian. She died at the age of 87.

The novelist and historian of British art, Anita Brookner, who received the Booker Prize 1984 Hotel du Lac , has died at the age of 87. According to his wishes, there will be no funeral. She had always attached filter to leave nothing of his private life, cultivating even a form of anonymity despite the fame that brought him twenty novels she wrote at age 50.

She had never married but insisted that his books were not his children. She spoke of his novels with a detachment that touched denigration, saying his novelist’s talent level was “middle-class” and “artistic medium.” Besides the works of Dickens, his favorite novel was Oblomov , “the story of a man who fails in everything.”

Born in London in 1928, she was the only daughter of a Polish couple who, during World War II, had anglicized his original surname, Bruckner, which sounded too German. His parents, weak, uprooted and unhappy, Anita Brookner said she felt she had child protection.

She wrote a novel that almost a year between 1980 and 2000 said she n loved her “not so much to write fiction but that it was addictive.” If his novels, populated by women, weak and anxious characters stuck in a hopeless existence, and cynical men in icy charm, are dark, his writings on art instead are led by a cheerful curiosity and a form of delectation.

During his studies at King’s College where she was bored farm, she discovered a taste for art and made it his specialty. She later taught art history at the University and published, in 1968, books on Watteau, Greuze then on David. She had an analytical mind and penetrating the gift of simply explaining to an audience uninitiated debates and artistic controversies.

She wrote great books including two on the romantic movement in France, The Genius of the Future and Romanticism and its Discontents that analyze the influence critics such as Zola, Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Huysmans and the Goncourt brothers on their time.