You enter a book like it’s a lake of black, icy pain. But at the bottom, you suddenly find yourself at a party: the joyful ambience of sperm whales tangoing, seahorses zouking, turtles twerking, giant cephalopods moonwalking. You always start with melancholy, the melancholy of being human, and any soul that can penetrate to the core of that feeling, and make it resonate in each and every one of us, that soul alone will be the soul of an artist—of a writer.
