OA AAYORTA - 'An Everlasting Evening'

    Eccentrically youthful to the core, it should come as no surprise to fans of the aged Andorran Oa Aayorta that the first lines of his new novel should simultaneously evoke the late British songsmiths Flanders and Swann and the musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist whilst examining with the relatively serious subject of an inadequate digestive system. Though critics are fond of attacking Aayorta for the countless demands he is said to impose upon his readers, the profound playfulness of the Andorran’s work is often overlooked. Shrewdly witty, with a charmingly unpretentious partiality for kitsch culture, you would be forgiven for thinking that there ought to be much more praise heaped upon his bone china plate than there presently is. However, the tide may be about to turn. Abandoning many of the exacting features of its predecessors, it is not unlikely that this, his third novel, might open the floodgates at last, allowing a lake of compliments larger than the author’s homeland to flood the parched landscape of the contemporary literary scene.

    In terms of the narrative, An Everlasting Evening begins where The Endless Winter Night left off, give or take a few months or so. The protagonist of the latter, once tossing and turning in the loose clutches of insomnia, has now completed the cookery competition that was the cause of his perpetual wakefulness. He came second – not enough to bag him the plentiful prize money on offer, but sufficient to gain him employment in the kitchen of a prestigious restaurant. It is in this highly-charged environment that we catch up with him, following his movements across a single evening as Aayorta attempts, for the third time, to deconstruct the workings of a single man’s mind over a specific period of time.

    What is different this time is that the novelist chooses not to rely on technological advances to further his cause. His debut feature, you may recall, was a novelistic film, in which a written narrative appeared in the subtitles with a silent soundtrack backing a visual narrative consisting of a man walking across Andorra. It’s successor - The Endless Winter Night - seemed simpler at first, comprising in the main of a regular novel, but demanding on the side that the reader should make use of a supplementary DVD, which showed looped footage of the author’s bedroom ceiling, filmed at night. The idea was that this should be playing in the background as the novel was read – but not everyone was willing to comply. An Everlasting Evening follows a similar pattern, but obedience to its demands will be surely more abundant, as the novel’s ‘supplement’ is in this case more immediately attractive than a recording of an old man’s ceiling. In short, each chapter is preceded by a recipe, which the author hopes that the reader will follow, cooking up a seven course meal over the course of the novel and eating each dish as one reads each chapter. This may sound needlessly complicated, but in reality it is an immensely enjoyable and rewarding experience (especially when one’s review copy is accompanied by all the required ingredients). At last Aayorta appears to have cracked the code of the interactive novel, creating a synthesis of language and taste unprecedented in the history of culture.

    That Aayorta should have finally found his way with the inclusion of food should not come as a surprise to his fans. For Aayorta is, above all, concerned with the accepted and unidentified (that is to say, hard to categorise) processes of memory and the mind. What we are doing when we enter our memories directs the manner in which we navigate through our memories. This is the central idea behind all three of Aayorta’s literary projects; exemplified by their common concern – to follow the workings of a man’s mind over a short space of time – and their appropriately varied approaches. In Silence with Subtitles, the spur to memory is consistent physical action mingled with a constant selection of recognisable ‘sights’, illustrated by a man walking at a regular speed through a familiar landscape. Memory is invoked deliberately: the man is walking because he wants to think. This is in direct comparison to The Endless Winter Night where encouragement is provided against the thinker’s wishes: memory being side-product of the inability to stop memory. This is a study of sleeplessness, where patterns are random and the path twists and turns; memory taking control of the mind, submitting it on occasion to the many undesirable angles of its multiple faces. The unpredictability of memory, such as it is, reoccurs in An Everlasting Evening, but the provocation is once again different. Physical action is again important, but here it is unmediated; subject to stops and starts which are out of the protagonist’s control. It is also subject to direction from an outside source, which can, by unintentional means, cause significant shifts in the flow of thought. This source is the protagonist’s sense of smell, which Aayorta hastens to connect to the configuration and subsequent movement of his mind, thereby establishing the oft noted but frequently undervalued relationship between memory and food. This author uses both to great and, sometimes curious effect - as we can see for ourselves:

‘You cannot extricate food from emotions. There are no rules, no precedents and no patterns – and yet the two are irresistibly bound together. Food is not the only thing that smells, no, but it is yet the major source of the memorable scents that will come to haunt us throughout our lives. Food is the unspoken source of a whole network of emotions… Love is, in itself, no more than a high generated by the fusion of scents and appetite…’

    I should at this point remind the readers that this passage ought only to be read whilst eating a delicate raspberry flavoured soufflé. Not that this dish will necessarily illuminate the words, but it will almost certainly enlighten the experience – and charm the taste buds. Otherwise, I have been unkind in choosing to pick out such a passage, one that is probably quite unrepresentative of the whole. For Aayorta’s development as a writer relies more and more on his ability to leave the significant things unsaid. He is a writer whose main concern is this: to get into people’s minds. And in doing so, it would seem natural that the majority of his prose should be littered not with the sticky dregs of quasi-profound thought, but with the formless substance of life itself, in all its commonly practical and ridiculously pointless artlessness. For that reason we have huge swathes of prose given over to a potato salad, or the poignant memory of sitting on a bench once, watching nothing much happen. Aayorta is especially good at recreating non-events; memories that endure for no good reason than that they are connected to an auxiliary entity (i.e. a scent). When he approaches the reality of such an insipid encounter, he is not only at his comical best, but closest to his goal: to map the contours of a human mind, in all its mysterious monotony. Needless to say, the inclusion of An Everlasting Evening into the Aayorta canon, while taking him further away from his earlier obsession with the potential of modern technology to enhance the written word, brings him closer than ever to his consistent ambitions. And on top of that, the grub ain’t half bad.

G R