Oğuz Atay was my first literary idol. The Turkish writer had been dead for 21 years when I discovered his debut novel, The Disconnected, in 1998. Atay’s narrator questioned the “unconscious indifference” with which Turks embraced “the colorless, odorless existences” of people around them. He described a society where even going alone to a cinema was considered a sign of degeneracy. He aspired to “radically change this destitute being” and become a “real person who wants to lead a life very different from those around him.” I felt transformed by the novel’s brutal honesty and experimental form. How could a Turkish man be this open about his vulnerabilities?
The shape-shifting form of Atay’s 724-page book, which contains a 77-page chapter written without commas or full stops and a poem of six hundred lines with commentary inspired by Pale Fire, was stunning. Beneath the modernist and postmodernist layers of the novel, published in two volumes in 1971 and 1972, I detected a queer core: the romantic, obsessive and erotic search of the protagonist Turgut for his beloved friend Selim, who commits suicide. Turgut was obviously in love with Selim, and after reading The Disconnected I felt that I was falling in love with Atay. Various portraits of Atay adorned the covers of the seven volumes of his collected works in Turkish. I recall studying his clean-shaven face, musing eyes and cryptic smile. I was sad that Atay had died young from an inoperable brain tumor when he was 43, the same age I am now.
Before discovering Atay in high school in Istanbul in the late 1990s, I had found Turkish literature dull and oppressive. Authors of the Millî Edebiyat (National Literature) movement—Turkish nationalist poets and novelists, often racist, who mythologized Turkey’s War of Independence in the 1920s—dominated school curricula. Their works, ideological instruments of the state’s nationalism, depicted women as untrustworthy and fickle. Cosmopolitan citizens, particularly poets, were heinous; Armenians and Greeks, backstabbers. Anglophones indulged in queer activities. Foreigners and foreignness were the enemies. Turkishness was the program for preserving heteronormative purity for the self and the nation, a way for the state to fight Turkey’s “enemies within” and around the world. “Three out of four novels in Turkish literature definitely feature a Greek or an Eastern Orthodox Christian character,” estimated the Turkish Greek scholar Hercules Millas in 2005, and in almost all cases they were villains. To savor Millî Edebiyat was to be a xenophobe.
Atay’s world was different. A writer at home in Russian classics, European history and the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf, he wrote freely about the daily concerns of metropolitan elites. From him I learned how Turkish literature could be honest and exciting when imaginations were unbridled and the devotion to describing reality as it existed was steadfast. In his telling, Turkey’s preachers of nationalism were selfish and opportunistic, obstacles to self-fulfillment and to being a truth-telling novelist. His depiction of Selim’s hellish school years and his conflict with Turkish customs matched my mood. In 1973, Atay followed the epic The Disconnected with a second novel, Dangerous Games, which sketched portraits of middle-class intellectuals and their struggles to live ethically. Atay’s advice in both books was to take refuge from the angry, nationalist majority by accepting solitude and marginalization. “Only disconnect” was the way to live a good life devoted to beauty and truth.
When I came across Atay’s work in the 1990s, he was becoming a household name in Turkey. Now, with the publication this October of his short story collection, Waiting for the Fear, in a fine English translation by Ralph Hubbell, he’s on his way to gaining a reputation in the Anglophone world as well. But during his lifetime, his books mostly gathered dust. Their honest depictions of the lives of depressed Turkish civil servants and suicidal professors didn’t impress critics in the wake of the military memorandum issued on March 12, 1971 that was meant to crush the Turkish left. The novels received the critical cold shoulder: reviewers with a socialist-realist bent dismissed Atay’s searching, scathing, self-obsessed metafictions as being too chatty. One Marxist scholar attacked Selim for not being “a positive character” and “the man of tomorrow’s world.” That verdict reflects an era when novels were expected to hand-hold readers and liberate them from selfishness with a social message. The right-wing critics were even harsher. One said he couldn’t “reconcile” Selim’s reading of the Bible with Atay, “a Turkish intellectual who grew up with the last remnants of Turkish-Islamic culture and civilization.” The rest of the response took the form of ignoring The Disconnected entirely.
When I attempted to write a novel in my mid-twenties, I began having reservations about Atay’s work too. As I wrote about my anxieties and frustrations, I feared that I was imitating him. I thought that his work might be, as his critics claimed, too wordy and self-obsessed. Besides, Atay’s perspective didn’t line up with the sociological, historical and political fictions I aspired to write. I resolved to keep my distance from his work to find “my voice.”
●
During the 2000s, the prevailing genre in Turkey was postmodernist historical fiction, inspired mainly by the novels of Orhan Pamuk. In newspaper interviews, writers boasted about logging years in libraries and devoting weeks or months to researching the Ottoman era, as Pamuk had done in preparation for writing My Name Is Red, which is rich with sixteenth-century Ottoman art history and focused on the miniaturists of the 1590s. Pamuk used historical fiction to say something original about the so-called East-West clash, which became a central concern after 9/11. There were no clear-cut distinctions between “Eastern” and “Western” artistic and political traditions, Pamuk showed. From perspective in art to individuality in literature, concepts carelessly associated with the Western tradition in order to draw distinctions with “the East” were in fact everyone’s legacy, not just Europe’s. For many, this scholarly path for the Turkish novel seemed fruitful: Pamuk had reminded them that the novel is about other people, not the life of the novelist. The more writers researched other Turks, the more they learned about Turkey’s troubled past. Perhaps this was what being a novelist in uncertain times meant.
Most of the authors who followed in Pamuk’s footsteps were men who wrote long, often laborious books about various historical eras, and in a style that sometimes smacked of imperial nostalgia and lacked Pamuk’s clever sense of perspective on the present. Take İskender Pala’s Tulip (2009): set in 1730 and structured as a murder mystery like My Name Is Red, it concerns two young men who “in their quest for love, set out to resolve the mystery of a brutal murder and to retrieve a priceless tulip.” Despite the accomplishments of these books, I became increasingly convinced that this genre would be a dead end for me, and ended up writing a homoerotic experimental novel set in contemporary Istanbul. A plague hits the city, and a group of Istanbulite men, led by a bookseller, struggle to flee the quarantined streets. The young bookseller, who is in his twenties, grows aware of his attraction to sailors. My debut sold around two thousand copies. A friend said the reason it didn’t reach a wide readership was the absence of a heterosexual love affair.
As I reached my thirties in the 2010s, I lost the desire to write another novel. Pamuk’s imitators still reigned, and I was discouraged by their scholarly pontifications and their blindness to their own experiences and emotions. Again, I felt the pull of Atay’s work and his worlds of angst, misanthropy, same-sex desire and shameless nonconformity. At the same time, I noticed that the male Turkish authors who had been lionized over the past decade didn’t entirely oppose the conventions of early twentieth-century Turkish literature. Although free from their xenophobic biases, they used the novel form to make known their views on history and politics. They wanted to address the largest possible audience, like politicians, and explain things to them. In doing so, they were avoiding the kind of self-reckoning I felt lay at the heart of great literature—precisely where Atay had excelled.
In the early 2020s, I discovered the works of Leylâ Erbil and Tezer Özlü, two female novelists whose books in recent years have become available in English, thanks to the efforts of the translators Maureen Freely, Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Spangler. Erbil and Özlü were crucial to my reevaluation of the Turkish novel: their books constituted an autofictional path for Turkish novels in the 1970s, one not taken. They spoke from the heart: each sentence felt lived, despite the carefully fictionalized structure. Erbil (1931–2013) and Özlü (1943–1986) were contemporaries of Atay’s and marginalized as mad, bad, sad women who wrote solipsistic books about queer desire, the institutionalization of the thoughtful and the oppressiveness of heteronormative Turkish men. Their best works—Erbil’s A Strange Woman and Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood and Journey to the Edge of Life—share an openness, lack of artifice and devotion to truth. Erbil writes freely of her sexual experiences in Beyoğlu, of sleeping with as many people as possible. Not for one minute does she fall for the fancy words of men about future and marriage. Özlü’s narrators, meanwhile, surveil the transformations of their bodies in puberty and under psychiatric care. Each phrase in her diaristic books diagnoses a heightened sensation: fury, ecstasy, fear, jouissance. In their autofictions, Erbil and Özlü strongly opposed the conventions of social realist literature of the 1970s, casting aside the mediation of a Balzacian narrator to contextualize their stories.
Rereading their work alongside Atay’s a few years ago, I appreciated how well they have endured. Around the same time, I was binging on Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Annie Ernaux’s oeuvre. Behind their sprawling and skeletal scaffoldings, I found the same devotion to telling one’s truth once and for all. Like Knausgaard and Ernaux, the authors in my Turkish autofictional pantheon recorded a range of sensitivities with tightly controlled narrative voices. Their achievements were rare. Last year, as I finally began writing my second book, an autofictional work about my sexual experiences and gender fluidity, I grew sad that not many Turkish authors had followed their path over the past half-century. The title of a book Atay had dreamed of writing but couldn’t because of his illness conjured the scope of ambition for this vein of writing: Türkiye’nin Ruhu, or “The Soul of Turkey.” Contemporary Turkish literature would look different if authors wrote soulful books like Atay’s that truly told us how it feels to live in Turkey.
●
Atay, who was born in 1934, had a short writing life. Only five years passed between the publication date of his debut, The Disconnected, in 1971 and 1972, and his death in 1977. He published three other novels: one of them, Science of Action, was left unfinished and published posthumously. A play of his was rejected by theater companies at the time. His only story collection, Waiting for the Fear, was published in 1975. In all these works, fear is the ground note. Waiting for the Fear is a set of Kafkaesque short stories that Atay began writing in 1972. And there is Atay’s Diary, whose posthumous publication in 1987 shocked Turkey’s intellectuals, his frequent targets. “The original sin” of Turkish citizens, he wrote, is the “fear of living” implanted by the Turkish state and its extension, the Turkish nuclear family. In an entry dated January 5, 1975, Atay complained of “a small semi-intellectual gang that has monopolized all kinds of progressive and reactionary movements, who has not felt the need to renew itself for years, and today, in order not to lose its place, is trying to survive.” Those people, he warned, “are not aware of the human being, the real human being. They truly remain ‘in a cowardly darkness.’ They’re afraid of living and having fun. They’re afraid of getting to know people, especially women.” Atay asked writers to “expose them everywhere” and embark on this confrontation in their novels, stories, and poems. “Of course, we have nothing to say to those afraid of themselves.”
This fear remains a defining feature of Turkish culture and politics. Last month, when I sent the finished manuscript of my second novel to my editor, I felt grateful to Atay for articulating its centrality and pervasiveness so many years ago. But I also felt regret for not finding the courage to attempt to write a book as soulful and authentic as his when I had taken him as my guide so early in my intellectual formation. For years I had waited in fear.
Photo credit: JoopAnt, “1973 Istanbul, bridge under construction over the Bosphorus,” Flickr (CC / BY-SA 4.0)
Oğuz Atay was my first literary idol. The Turkish writer had been dead for 21 years when I discovered his debut novel, The Disconnected, in 1998. Atay’s narrator questioned the “unconscious indifference” with which Turks embraced “the colorless, odorless existences” of people around them. He described a society where even going alone to a cinema was considered a sign of degeneracy. He aspired to “radically change this destitute being” and become a “real person who wants to lead a life very different from those around him.” I felt transformed by the novel’s brutal honesty and experimental form. How could a Turkish man be this open about his vulnerabilities?
The shape-shifting form of Atay’s 724-page book, which contains a 77-page chapter written without commas or full stops and a poem of six hundred lines with commentary inspired by Pale Fire, was stunning. Beneath the modernist and postmodernist layers of the novel, published in two volumes in 1971 and 1972, I detected a queer core: the romantic, obsessive and erotic search of the protagonist Turgut for his beloved friend Selim, who commits suicide. Turgut was obviously in love with Selim, and after reading The Disconnected I felt that I was falling in love with Atay. Various portraits of Atay adorned the covers of the seven volumes of his collected works in Turkish. I recall studying his clean-shaven face, musing eyes and cryptic smile. I was sad that Atay had died young from an inoperable brain tumor when he was 43, the same age I am now.
Before discovering Atay in high school in Istanbul in the late 1990s, I had found Turkish literature dull and oppressive. Authors of the Millî Edebiyat (National Literature) movement—Turkish nationalist poets and novelists, often racist, who mythologized Turkey’s War of Independence in the 1920s—dominated school curricula. Their works, ideological instruments of the state’s nationalism, depicted women as untrustworthy and fickle. Cosmopolitan citizens, particularly poets, were heinous; Armenians and Greeks, backstabbers. Anglophones indulged in queer activities. Foreigners and foreignness were the enemies. Turkishness was the program for preserving heteronormative purity for the self and the nation, a way for the state to fight Turkey’s “enemies within” and around the world. “Three out of four novels in Turkish literature definitely feature a Greek or an Eastern Orthodox Christian character,” estimated the Turkish Greek scholar Hercules Millas in 2005, and in almost all cases they were villains. To savor Millî Edebiyat was to be a xenophobe.
Atay’s world was different. A writer at home in Russian classics, European history and the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf, he wrote freely about the daily concerns of metropolitan elites. From him I learned how Turkish literature could be honest and exciting when imaginations were unbridled and the devotion to describing reality as it existed was steadfast. In his telling, Turkey’s preachers of nationalism were selfish and opportunistic, obstacles to self-fulfillment and to being a truth-telling novelist. His depiction of Selim’s hellish school years and his conflict with Turkish customs matched my mood. In 1973, Atay followed the epic The Disconnected with a second novel, Dangerous Games, which sketched portraits of middle-class intellectuals and their struggles to live ethically. Atay’s advice in both books was to take refuge from the angry, nationalist majority by accepting solitude and marginalization. “Only disconnect” was the way to live a good life devoted to beauty and truth.
When I came across Atay’s work in the 1990s, he was becoming a household name in Turkey. Now, with the publication this October of his short story collection, Waiting for the Fear, in a fine English translation by Ralph Hubbell, he’s on his way to gaining a reputation in the Anglophone world as well. But during his lifetime, his books mostly gathered dust. Their honest depictions of the lives of depressed Turkish civil servants and suicidal professors didn’t impress critics in the wake of the military memorandum issued on March 12, 1971 that was meant to crush the Turkish left. The novels received the critical cold shoulder: reviewers with a socialist-realist bent dismissed Atay’s searching, scathing, self-obsessed metafictions as being too chatty. One Marxist scholar attacked Selim for not being “a positive character” and “the man of tomorrow’s world.” That verdict reflects an era when novels were expected to hand-hold readers and liberate them from selfishness with a social message. The right-wing critics were even harsher. One said he couldn’t “reconcile” Selim’s reading of the Bible with Atay, “a Turkish intellectual who grew up with the last remnants of Turkish-Islamic culture and civilization.” The rest of the response took the form of ignoring The Disconnected entirely.
When I attempted to write a novel in my mid-twenties, I began having reservations about Atay’s work too. As I wrote about my anxieties and frustrations, I feared that I was imitating him. I thought that his work might be, as his critics claimed, too wordy and self-obsessed. Besides, Atay’s perspective didn’t line up with the sociological, historical and political fictions I aspired to write. I resolved to keep my distance from his work to find “my voice.”
●
During the 2000s, the prevailing genre in Turkey was postmodernist historical fiction, inspired mainly by the novels of Orhan Pamuk. In newspaper interviews, writers boasted about logging years in libraries and devoting weeks or months to researching the Ottoman era, as Pamuk had done in preparation for writing My Name Is Red, which is rich with sixteenth-century Ottoman art history and focused on the miniaturists of the 1590s. Pamuk used historical fiction to say something original about the so-called East-West clash, which became a central concern after 9/11. There were no clear-cut distinctions between “Eastern” and “Western” artistic and political traditions, Pamuk showed. From perspective in art to individuality in literature, concepts carelessly associated with the Western tradition in order to draw distinctions with “the East” were in fact everyone’s legacy, not just Europe’s. For many, this scholarly path for the Turkish novel seemed fruitful: Pamuk had reminded them that the novel is about other people, not the life of the novelist. The more writers researched other Turks, the more they learned about Turkey’s troubled past. Perhaps this was what being a novelist in uncertain times meant.
Most of the authors who followed in Pamuk’s footsteps were men who wrote long, often laborious books about various historical eras, and in a style that sometimes smacked of imperial nostalgia and lacked Pamuk’s clever sense of perspective on the present. Take İskender Pala’s Tulip (2009): set in 1730 and structured as a murder mystery like My Name Is Red, it concerns two young men who “in their quest for love, set out to resolve the mystery of a brutal murder and to retrieve a priceless tulip.” Despite the accomplishments of these books, I became increasingly convinced that this genre would be a dead end for me, and ended up writing a homoerotic experimental novel set in contemporary Istanbul. A plague hits the city, and a group of Istanbulite men, led by a bookseller, struggle to flee the quarantined streets. The young bookseller, who is in his twenties, grows aware of his attraction to sailors. My debut sold around two thousand copies. A friend said the reason it didn’t reach a wide readership was the absence of a heterosexual love affair.
As I reached my thirties in the 2010s, I lost the desire to write another novel. Pamuk’s imitators still reigned, and I was discouraged by their scholarly pontifications and their blindness to their own experiences and emotions. Again, I felt the pull of Atay’s work and his worlds of angst, misanthropy, same-sex desire and shameless nonconformity. At the same time, I noticed that the male Turkish authors who had been lionized over the past decade didn’t entirely oppose the conventions of early twentieth-century Turkish literature. Although free from their xenophobic biases, they used the novel form to make known their views on history and politics. They wanted to address the largest possible audience, like politicians, and explain things to them. In doing so, they were avoiding the kind of self-reckoning I felt lay at the heart of great literature—precisely where Atay had excelled.
In the early 2020s, I discovered the works of Leylâ Erbil and Tezer Özlü, two female novelists whose books in recent years have become available in English, thanks to the efforts of the translators Maureen Freely, Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Spangler. Erbil and Özlü were crucial to my reevaluation of the Turkish novel: their books constituted an autofictional path for Turkish novels in the 1970s, one not taken. They spoke from the heart: each sentence felt lived, despite the carefully fictionalized structure. Erbil (1931–2013) and Özlü (1943–1986) were contemporaries of Atay’s and marginalized as mad, bad, sad women who wrote solipsistic books about queer desire, the institutionalization of the thoughtful and the oppressiveness of heteronormative Turkish men. Their best works—Erbil’s A Strange Woman and Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood and Journey to the Edge of Life—share an openness, lack of artifice and devotion to truth. Erbil writes freely of her sexual experiences in Beyoğlu, of sleeping with as many people as possible. Not for one minute does she fall for the fancy words of men about future and marriage. Özlü’s narrators, meanwhile, surveil the transformations of their bodies in puberty and under psychiatric care. Each phrase in her diaristic books diagnoses a heightened sensation: fury, ecstasy, fear, jouissance. In their autofictions, Erbil and Özlü strongly opposed the conventions of social realist literature of the 1970s, casting aside the mediation of a Balzacian narrator to contextualize their stories.
Rereading their work alongside Atay’s a few years ago, I appreciated how well they have endured. Around the same time, I was binging on Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Annie Ernaux’s oeuvre. Behind their sprawling and skeletal scaffoldings, I found the same devotion to telling one’s truth once and for all. Like Knausgaard and Ernaux, the authors in my Turkish autofictional pantheon recorded a range of sensitivities with tightly controlled narrative voices. Their achievements were rare. Last year, as I finally began writing my second book, an autofictional work about my sexual experiences and gender fluidity, I grew sad that not many Turkish authors had followed their path over the past half-century. The title of a book Atay had dreamed of writing but couldn’t because of his illness conjured the scope of ambition for this vein of writing: Türkiye’nin Ruhu, or “The Soul of Turkey.” Contemporary Turkish literature would look different if authors wrote soulful books like Atay’s that truly told us how it feels to live in Turkey.
●
Atay, who was born in 1934, had a short writing life. Only five years passed between the publication date of his debut, The Disconnected, in 1971 and 1972, and his death in 1977. He published three other novels: one of them, Science of Action, was left unfinished and published posthumously. A play of his was rejected by theater companies at the time. His only story collection, Waiting for the Fear, was published in 1975. In all these works, fear is the ground note. Waiting for the Fear is a set of Kafkaesque short stories that Atay began writing in 1972. And there is Atay’s Diary, whose posthumous publication in 1987 shocked Turkey’s intellectuals, his frequent targets. “The original sin” of Turkish citizens, he wrote, is the “fear of living” implanted by the Turkish state and its extension, the Turkish nuclear family. In an entry dated January 5, 1975, Atay complained of “a small semi-intellectual gang that has monopolized all kinds of progressive and reactionary movements, who has not felt the need to renew itself for years, and today, in order not to lose its place, is trying to survive.” Those people, he warned, “are not aware of the human being, the real human being. They truly remain ‘in a cowardly darkness.’ They’re afraid of living and having fun. They’re afraid of getting to know people, especially women.” Atay asked writers to “expose them everywhere” and embark on this confrontation in their novels, stories, and poems. “Of course, we have nothing to say to those afraid of themselves.”
This fear remains a defining feature of Turkish culture and politics. Last month, when I sent the finished manuscript of my second novel to my editor, I felt grateful to Atay for articulating its centrality and pervasiveness so many years ago. But I also felt regret for not finding the courage to attempt to write a book as soulful and authentic as his when I had taken him as my guide so early in my intellectual formation. For years I had waited in fear.
Photo credit: JoopAnt, “1973 Istanbul, bridge under construction over the Bosphorus,” Flickr (CC / BY-SA 4.0)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.