The loneliness of bureaucracy eventually descends upon everyone. The cogs of citizenship never do run smoothly. From Kafka to Kundera, the hallowed halls of government have been critiqued and parodied for their nameless, faceless power. Oğuz Atay’s short stories explore men made anonymous by casual cruelty. They chronicle a certain political ennui in 1970s Turkey—though unlike his fellow countrywoman Sevgi Soysal, Atay is more interested in absurdist dead ends than in politics. Beggars are scorned, men in women’s overcoats are called perverts, and dissidents hide in wooden horses. Waiting for the Fear was originally published in 1975. Little of Atay’s work has been translated into English, though he died at the age of forty-three, after publishing only a small number of books and stories, and only two years after this story collection came out in Turkey. With this book, published by New York Review Books, and deftly translated by Ralph Hubbell, with a luminous introduction by Merve Emre, Atay’s work is being revived. Emre calls his writing “one of the crowning achievements of Turkish literature.”
His cranky narrators evoke the long, rambling monologues of Bernhard or Nabokov, but while many of the stories are told in the first person—often through letters—their speakers read more as orators of parables than as specific personalities. They spurt out confessions and aggression in a typical stream-of-consciousness style, often bumping up against indifference and nihilism. Rarely are they nationalistic; instead, they prefer solitude. The narrator of the titular story hides out in his home, afraid of a secret society that may or may not exist. He spends his time watching the house next door being demolished and rebuilt, or making Noah’s pudding, a concoction one must look up online to truly understand. (The version made in the story is a bizarre pauper’s version.) One of the few women in Atay’s stories finds the body of an ex-lover preserved in her attic—the twist comes at the end: her husband is downstairs. These labyrinthine tales writhe with laconic musings, mannequins, and martyrs. They lose themselves in their minds; their intellects are a stumbling block. “Not Yes, Not No” is told in the competing narratives of a letter writer, and of the respondent in parentheticals. Such interruptions of the main narrative are not so much diversions but rather the main point. Being lost is an orientation toward the world. These writers wait for their lives to begin, but they never do; they merely complain that so few people read anymore, “which was why you couldn’t trust the culture of a people who repeated everything they heard.”
Such alienation from language is tragic. As the narrator of “Waiting for the Fear” tries to learn Latin, he longs for new words. “Words refused to describe me.” The final story in Atay’s collection is about a man who sells stories, though eventually he struggles to remember enough about the world to continue setting pen to paper. The narrator of “A Letter” also finds communication and vocabulary a puzzle. He doesn’t like the word comical and frequently stumbles over his own interior monologue, failing to extract his true meaning. Language is both his raison d’être and his greatest puzzle. “Obviously, there’s nothing more normal than thinking nothing about something,” he says. Of a foe, he remarks that “despite all his learning he couldn’t get any of his ideas across.” Elsewhere, in “Wooden Horse,” one of the only stories told in the third person, Atay uses the language of Homer to work through the tension between tourism and national identity. “What mentality does this farcical concrete animal represent?”
Atay’s characters are a product of modernism’s compression. Each citizen waits in line for the fear to dissipate, and the sun rises yet again on every lonely miser.
Publisher: New York Review Books Page count: 240 Price: $16.95 Key quote: “Then I went home to my loneliness.” Shelve next to: Kafka, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Sorokin, Thomas Bernhard, Bend Sinister Unscientifically calculated reading time: A few cranky hours while trying to figure out what Noah’s pudding is and how to make it
