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Paul Auster has died. He is my favourite novelist. Being of a morbid disposition, I’ve been imagining this day for many years and now it’s true. I’ve been reading him for 25 years. Appropriately, there’s two versions in my memory of how I found him. In one version, I remember roaming the shelves of the Murdoch University library as a first year, picking books off the shelf serendipitously – which is not quite randomly – and once I picked up one of his books – perhaps Leviathan – and was hooked. In the other version, it was through my creative writing class I discovered him, an extract from The Invention of Solitude which I loved. Either way, I took out the Invention of Solitude after that and halfway through, I accidentally left it on a bench at the Perth Busport and had to pay $100 for a replacement (they did not replace it) and be reprimanded by a librarian. It was some years before I got to finish reading that beautiful memoir.
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