"David Martin taught me many things: how to create a sentence, how to think about language and all its devices as an orchestra in search of a musical score, how to analyse a text and understand how it is constructed and why ... He taught me to read and write again, but this time I knew what I was doing, why, and what for. And above all how. He never tired of telling me that in literature there is only one real theme: not what is narrated, but how it is narrated. The rest, he said, was decoration. He also told me that writing was a profession one had to learn, but was impossible to teach: "Whoever doesn't understand that principle may as well devote their life to something else, for there are lots of things to be done in this world." He"