Description
“Avalo sat in wide-eyed quiet stillness in the warehouse office on the Ides of May staring at the blanknesses of the pages on his desk and the one on his computer screen, tumbling last night’s thoughts with the morning’s hazy gathering. His mind wandered to Kerouac’s The Town and the City which he had been reading the night before on the couch, biting on a tuft of cotton to stop the blood from the wound that drooled, gaping like a laughing little mouth within its mouth, where the last wisdom tooth had been. Kerouac had used the term “starwealthy” to describe a night sky. This is what Avalo wanted to be. He wanted to be a starwealthy night sky. He wanted to feel starwealthiness.”
In the dead time between deciding to leave and doing so, Avalo drifts through the remnants of his Cyprus life. Avalo is an intense arabesque of poetic attitude, weaving highly charged observations with surreal, nightmarish dreamscapes to capture the dissatisfaction and dislocation of the eponymous hero as he tries to salvage some meaning from his experiences. At times dense, often scathingly witty, and never less than challenging, Avalo is testament to Yacoubian’s restless search for “starwealthiness”.
