The latest victim of The Curse of Electric Halibut's relentless campaign of senseless slaughter is Paul Auster, who died yesterday aged 77. I try (albeit with occasional lapses) not to get into too much ghoulish speculation of the hand-rubbing WHO'S NEXT variety and therefore don't keep a list of who's got what possibly-terminal medical problem(s), but he'd apparently been suffering from lung cancer for a while.
The book that brought Auster's life into peril was Invisible, back in April 2012, which makes it also the first new book I started after becoming a father (The Tax Inspector was the book I was in the middle of reading when Nia was born). The only other one of his I've read, The New York Trilogy (as the name suggests, originally published as three separate works), is probably the one most people would have you start with. If you're highly allergic to metafictional rug-pulls and general structural and stylistic tricksiness you might be best advised to give it a miss altogether, though.
As recently as late 2020 the 12-year curse length would have qualified as the longest one ever, but a whole succession of slow-acting chickens have come home to roost since then, and Alison Lurie, John le Carré, Cormac McCarthy and current record-holder Milan Kundera have all met their demise after longer intervals. If you think about how the curse process works you'll realise that this (i.e. gradually longer intervals) is of course inevitable.
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