There is something bittersweet about discovering a writer you have long disdained as small beer: the pleasure of an untapped well, followed immediately by the question of how your sensibility was so eluded by a major figure.

Such was my opinion of Paul Auster. I regarded him from a distance as a certain kind of American literary novelist: self-regarding, architecturally post-modern, finally thin. Something drew me, finally, toward his non-fiction autobiographical work, The Red Notebooks, Winter Journal, The Invention of Solitude, which I am now reading. He writes brilliantly of mortality and ageing, and of how doubt inserts itself over time, undermining once fixed certainties.

It may have been reading Lydia Davis’s first essay collection that pulled Auster into my orbit. Now I can’t get enough of his voice.