Facebook X Email Print Save Story 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 Cumhuriy.