It was a shock to learn that the writer Oğuz Atay was only forty-three years old when he died in 1977, of a brain tumor. The eight stories in “Waiting for the Fear,” first published in 1975 and reissued, this month, by New York Review Books, evoke the rancor and the loneliness of a much older man—the beneficiary of a lifetime’s worth of disappointment. For those who knew Atay, nothing could have been further from the truth. He was reputed to be even-keeled, modest, largely content with his life as a professor of engineering who, in private, happened to write some of the funniest and most enigmatic fiction in Turkey. Photographs show a boyish, handsomely dressed man with laughing eyes and a trim little mustache, sitting at his desk or standing by the seashore with his daughter. “Ben sanıldığı kadar karamsar değilim,” he liked to insist. “I am not as pessimistic as people think.” How to explain the absurdism and the despair of his writing, which stands as one of the crowning achievements of Turkish literature?
His biography offers several clues. Atay was born in 1934, near the Black Sea port town of İnebolu—the city where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic, had donned a jaunty Panama hat to give a speech decrying the barbarism of the fez and other Ottoman fashions. Atay’s mother taught at a local school. His father, a judge, had been elected to parliament as a member of Atatürk’s Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi—the only party at the time—which oversaw the vast autocratic project of modernizing the new nation. When Atay was five, the family moved to the capital city of Ankara; there, the boy was educated in the leading institutions of the Kemalist élite, bastions of rationality, efficiency, progress, and other eagerly adopted European values. He was a precocious reader, but his grades in science were so good, he claimed, that he had had no choice but to study engineering at the prestigious İstanbul Teknik Üniversite. His first book, “Topoğrafya,” was a textbook for students of cartography.
His success, the apparent ease with which he navigated Kemalist enclaves, must have aroused some irritation, some discontent in Atay. His favorite writers were the creators of sensitive outcasts, monstrous antiheroes—writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, who, in 1863, had marvelled at how his stubborn countrymen had not “metamorphosed into Europeans,” despite being subjected to their “overwhelming influence.” A similar admiration for the intransigence of one’s people runs through Atay’s first novel, “Tutunamayanlar.” Its protagonist, an engineer named Turgut, is determined to piece together the last years of his long-lost friend Selim, who has taken his own life. On his quest, Turgut encounters Selim’s many strange, ungovernable acquaintances and discovers that Selim had begun to assemble an encyclopedia of tutunamayanlar—“those who cannot hold on,” or, more lyrically, “the disconnected.” Like Gustave Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pécuchet” or James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” “Tutunamayanlar” is a magnificent and exhausting work, patched together from epistolary fragments, diaristic screeds, mock-epic poems, courtroom testimonies, allusions, riddles, and puns. At moments, it seems like a rebuke to that other great Turkish modern novel, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s “Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü” (or “The Time Regulation Institute”). Tanpınar burrows into the bureaucracies of the state, constructing a narrative world that grows ever more labyrinthine and totalizing. Atay lingers on the outskirts, keeping the company of workers and wastrels, poets and drunks—all those who refuse the monumental transformations of Turkish society.
Atay wrote “Tutunamayanlar” in a single, feverish year, 1968. He spent the next year revising it, cutting five hundred pages, then adding six hundred new ones. When he told professors in the university’s literature department that he was writing a novel, they looked at him with pity. When he told publishers what he planned to call it, they laughed. In 1970, he submitted it to the Türkiye Radyo ve Televizyon Novel Prize, which it won; by then, one imagines, the publishers had stopped laughing and the professors had slunk back to their offices. Yet by the time Atay wrote his second novel, “Tehlikeli Oyunlar” (“Dangerous Games”), about a disenchanted Turkish intellectual, the dream of becoming a novelist had lost some of its romance: “When I was young, I thought writing a novel was thrilling; now, I just think it’s tiring.” Even when he started to publish the stories that would be collected in “Waiting for the Fear,” he held out hopes of becoming a great scientist. “Maybe we live in the country where everyone wants to be different from what they are,” he wrote.
The characters in “Waiting for the Fear” do not know what or who they are; their self-estrangement is the source of their drama. The first story, “Man in a White Overcoat,” is the only one narrated in the third person. Four stories (“The Forgotten,” “Waiting for the Fear,” “Wooden Horse,” and “Railway Storytellers”) are first-person inner monologues. Three stories (“A Letter—Unsent,” “Not Yes Not No,” and “Letter to My Father”) take the form of letters. There is almost no difference between how Atay’s narrators think and how they write, which gives the collection a remarkable unity and a sense of momentum. The typical Atay narrator is intelligent, brash, self-conscious, and male. Most of the time, he remains anonymous, never revealing his name or where he comes from. He speaks in an outpouring of language, a confession that anxiously draws attention to its own anarchy and excess—to “this chaotic succession of ideas we call ‘stream of consciousness,’ ” as one narrator puts it. He interrupts his own thoughts to interrogate a poorly chosen word or a clichéd phrase. He cannot accept, as many of us do, the essential artifice of words—the fact that they were invented by people to be used in common. “Words refused to describe me,” another narrator laments. “If only I could have had some words of my own, my own sentences and thoughts.”
There is an aggressive intimacy to Atay’s style, a perverse hospitality to his postmodern tales of indignation and woe. To read these stories is to be forcefully ushered into the home of a friend, to listen to him rant, yet to find his bizarre performance endearing, even lovable. Both the flow and the fragmentation of the Turkish is tremendously difficult to render in English. Atay’s translator, Ralph Hubbell, performs a near-miracle. He re-creates the frantic twists and turns of Atay’s sentences—their slow-building claustrophobia, their persistent self-negation, their blunt humor—without attempting to reproduce their diction or syntax. He exercises a marvellous restraint, too. Turkish is a densely metaphoric and accretive language. Consider a sentence from the first paragraph of “The Forgotten,” in which the narrator is searching the attic for some old books. Her lover or husband hands her a flashlight. “Fenerli elin ucundaki ışık, rasgele, önemsiz bir köşeyi aydınlattı; bu eli okşadı. El kayboldu,” Atay writes. Or, unpoetically, “The light at the end of the hand holding the flashlight randomly illuminated an unimportant corner; she stroked this hand. It disappeared.” With some rearrangement and compression, Hubbell streamlines the sentence without sacrificing its uncanniness: “The beam strayed towards an empty corner and lit it up. She touched the hand; it disappeared.”
The translation makes clear that the force of Atay’s fiction emerges from the tension between the purposive activity of his language and his narrators’ “state of vague revolt” against it. The main character of “Man in a White Overcoat” is a beggar who has “failed at begging,” likely because “he had no injury, talent or pathetic deformity.” Atay compares him to a stain, featureless and misshapen. Wandering around a mosque and its nearby marketplace, the beggar finds his way into an overcoat. This is not Nikolai Gogol’s perfectly tailored overcoat. It is a woman’s garment, with “oversized buttons and a flared skirt.” Why does the man put it on, smiling? Who is he? The mystery deepens as he roams aimlessly through the city, mingling with its pushy, sweaty, inexhaustible venders: simit sellers, corn sellers, comb sellers, lotto-ticket sellers, shirt sellers, yogurt sellers, beltmakers, shoe shiners. Just as they peddle their familiar wares, Atay peddles the familiar tropes of alienation. The beggar observes his wandering reflection in an “enormous engraved gilt mirror.” The overcoat resembles “a ghost.” A fabric salesman poses the beggar as a “live manikin” in the store window, attaching fabric and string to his arms like “a puppet.” Slipping in and out of the crowd, harassed and mocked, he is at once a man of the people and a martyr to their misunderstanding. “Two boys sat on top of the park entrance wall watching him. ‘Take a look at this,’ said the one in a flat cap, ‘he looks like a statue.’ ‘Or a crucifix,’ said the other, and they both laughed.”
The reader has no access to the mind of the man in the overcoat, making him the perfect foil to the narrators of the seven stories that follow. These narrators offer us glimpses of pure consciousness, their fearful minds splayed out on the page. In the extraordinary title story, “Waiting for the Fear,” a man receives a blank envelope containing a letter written in a dialect that he cannot decipher. His own language, however, is just as garbled and mysterious:
Hubbell’s translation chimes beautifully with the rhythm and the repetitions of the Turkish. The long sentence that details the items on the shelf—the vase, the lighter, the book, the ashtray—is comically over-elaborated; its particularity allows us to share in the narrator’s familiarity with these objects. Yet this sentence yields to a series of shorter sentences that focus the narrator’s attention on an unfamiliar object—the envelope. It short-circuits his thought, turning it back on itself. All his thinking becomes about the language in which he thinks—about “because” (çünkü) and “which meant” (demek); words that propose and conclude, respectively, but which have no meaning in and of themselves. The narrator knows that there is something cheapening and peculiarly hollow about all this cogitation. “I could get so obsessed over something that the very number of my thoughts would decrease,” he thinks. “It was as if the pieces of my mind had gotten mixed up with all the junk in my drawers, the closets, in the storeroom.”
Atay’s narrators are obsessives. They do not choose details; they fixate on them. Among their main fixations is modern Turkish, a language made up of flashy imports—French and English cognates, a new alphabet—and antique idioms. “My country and its people infuriated me,” the narrator of “Waiting for the Fear” complains. “I didn’t exist; I didn’t even occupy a place where I could say I didn’t exist.” Where he is livid, the narrator of “A Letter: Unsent” is apologetic, obsequious even, in his address to the cultivated man with whom he works: he doesn’t want “to burden you with my troubles using a dated vernacular and old-fashioned expressions, and so I’ve located a dictionary and am keeping it close at hand while I write these words.” The narrator of “Letter to My Father” is more rueful. He wishes that his deceased father had made his peace with his culture’s borrowed words and left behind a work of significance: “It’s just that in this country where no one really knows much about anything, I wonder if you couldn’t have used the old scissor method and taken a little of this and a little of that—from the works of foreign writers, of course—and left us with a text or two.”
