Review: Waiting for Fear, Oguz Atay
By Luke Frostick
Oguz Atay is one of Turkey’s pioneering modernist writers. His most famous novel Tutunamayanlar was published in English a few years ago, but is quite hard to get hold of. However, a collection of his short stories has been compiled into a volume called Waiting For Fear.
The book is a collection of strange tales. In Waiting for Fear, a man is trapped in his house by the fear of a secret society’s persecution; in Neither Yes nor No a columnist responds to a strange personal letter, and in The Forgotten a woman makes a grisly discovery in her attic. Like other modernists of the same time in Turkey including Yusuf Atilgan, the book focuses on the inner lives of its characters and the narratives are often presented as internal, phycological dramas.
I am in many ways an inappropriate person to review this book. I have always struggled with the most modernist of modernist literature. I find Woolf hard work and Joyce unreadable. So many of the things I found difficult about Waiting For Fear are the same as the problems I have with the genre more broadly. Its complexity, extreme density and manufactured incoherency make it difficult for me to maintain my immersion and end up detracting from the reading experience. I find that many of the innovations of the modernist style get in the way of enjoying the read. And this book is experimental, it plays around with stream of consciousness, unreliable narrators, epistolary writing and the majority of the narratives play out inside the heads of the characters. None of these would be a problem individually, but in Waiting For Fear it is all laid on thick.
The book has areas I appreciated for sure. It has comedic, absurdist and ironic touches that I enjoyed. In particular I found the commentary in Neither Yes nor No funny, as a wry journalist mocks and edits an odd letter sent to him. In addition, the narratives themselves are good, telling profound stories, but it just takes a lot of work from the reader to get to them.
Although this book didn’t work for me, I still think that a lot of credit is due to the translator Fulya Peker. The prose style is incredibly dense and Atay is famous for using extremely nuanced Turkish. Peker was faced with a common and much debated problem when dealing with particular linguistically rich books. Peker had to find a balance between faithful translation, the most proper English, and trying to capture the original voice of the writer as authentically as possible. The translator decided to sacrifice natural English to maintain as much of Atay style as possible. Given that style is the central point of the book, the translator made the right decision here.
I can see why the work of Oguz Atay is famous and it is certainly great that publisher are bringing out material like this into English. The stories contained in Waiting For Fear are daring, experimental and literary. If this is the kind of fiction that you enjoy, and have a higher tolerance for modernism than I do, then this book is for you. If not, well, you might want to take a pass on this one.
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