As I am writing these lines, a neighbor in my ancestral village (and like almost everyone there, a remote relative), who led a modest but comfortable life, ate food he grew by himself, drank his own pastis (arak), that sort of thing, left an estate of a hundred million dollars, a hundred times what one would have expected him to leave. So the next time you randomly pick a novel, avoid the one with the author photo representing a pensive man with an ascot standing in front of wall-to-wall bookshelves.
