In her introduction to this collection, the critic Merve Emre writes: “The characters in Waiting for the Fear do not know what or who they are; their self-estrangement is the source of their drama.” It’s a succinct summation of Oğuz Atay’s short fiction, originally published in Turkish as Korkuyu Beklerken in 1975 and now translated into English by Ralph Hubbell in 2024. 

One of the most prominent writers of 20th-century Turkey, Atay (1934-1977) was known for his experimentation and linguistic dexterity. His first novel, a 700-page staggering behemoth titled Tutunamayanlar (1971-72)—The Disconnected in English—is a good example. It follows an engineer named Turgut Özbenin in his attempt to uncover the last years of his long-lost friend Selim Işik after his suicide. Atay followed that with Tehlikeli Oyunlar aka Dangerous Games (1973), which revolves around a disillusioned Turkish intellectual no longer enchanted by the idea of becoming a novelist. Waiting for the Fear features eight stories of varying lengths that follow protagonists on the sidelines of society, looking in.

Voice is a significant aspect of Atay’s narratives. “Man in a White Overcoat”, the first story in Waiting for the Fear, is the only one written in the third person. Out of the remaining seven, four are first-person monologues, and three are epistolary. Despite the difference in form, the collection has a remarkable unity, attributable to Atay’s mercurial narrators. 

The narratorial style of Waiting for the Fear is best described as stream-of-consciousness, which ably lends itself to Atay’s oddball social outcasts. Their intelligence is shrouded in self-doubt, and their shortcomings are made up for with brashness. While they have defining characteristics that help to set them apart from each other, his narrators are wretched and pathetic in the same frustrating ways when they attempt to articulate their sense of alienation. Theirs is a volubility that quickly grows stale and overbearing. They are prone to soliloquize with chaotic excess as they double down or second-guess themselves.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the titular piece, which is more of a novella. The protagonist of “Waiting for the Fear” is a recluse who is always afraid of his highly ordered life going off-track. One day, when he returns home, he finds an envelope on a shelf when there shouldn’t have been one. Inside, a short message in a strange language that he cannot decipher. 

Later, a university professor friend tells him that it’s a threat from a secret society warning him not to step outside of his house. All this sends him spiralling. He jumps at shadows, stops going to work, and orders in all his groceries. His loneliness and level of fear are directly proportional to each other. The more he isolates himself, the more afraid he becomes. His existence is no more than a haunting. Yet, the fear only curtails his physical movements. His mind goes into overdrive as he agonises over himself, his life choices, and his actions. Much like Atay’s other main characters, he is quick to self-criticize, even though he paradoxically considers himself an elevated man above the riff-raff. 

Comparing himself to other recipients of the letters, past and present, he writes: “I, however, was a cheap novel. No, even bad literature had some truth to it: Its dull fabrications were truer than me! I didn’t exist; I didn’t even occupy a place where I could say I didn’t exist. Words refused to describe me. If only I could have had some words of my own, my own sentences and thoughts.” It is self-deprecation taken to an extreme where the protagonist projects himself as the object of abject pity. Yet, one is liable to say that the protagonist is more a victim of his self-inflicted inertia. This refusal to act, to freeze in the face of confrontation, is also present in Atay’s letter stories. 

When one thinks of letters, two interlocutors come to mind: the letter writer and the addressee. It is a relationship characterised by dialogue, a back-and-forth between another character or individual within the narrative or even the external reader outside the narrative. In Atay’s case, though, things are slightly different. The letters in these stories are never, or can never be, actually sent. They become a rhetorical device that accepts no response, existing just for the sake of it. 

At one level, they all seem to be a gesture towards closure and purging of emotions for the letter writer who is content just having written them. At another, they are frustrated attempts at communication that get thwarted for various reasons both within and without the writer’s power. Without recipients who can receive and respond to these letters, the reader takes on that role, almost eavesdropping on an intimate activity and becoming the unintended addressees who cannot participate in the ritual.

“A Letter: Unsent” gives away this device in the title. It is a long, rambling letter written by a nervous, obsequious man to a higher-ranked colleague. From what the writer shares, the recipient is a cultivated man with European tastes who moves in rarefied circles. The prose shows the writer’s nervousness as he keeps going into parenthetical asides and digressions before correcting himself. What we see is the letter in its raw form: “I refuse to edit what I’ve written; my respect for you won’t allow it, I must appear to you exactly as I am, because one should never lie to anyone, not even once in one’s life, isn’t that right, sir?” The writer needs to be seen as he is, without filter or facade. The ordeal of writing the letter gives him anxiety, yet he soldiers on. Nonetheless, he ultimately never mails it and locks it away. 

In “Letter to My Father”, the letter-writer cannot get a response to his missive because the recipient, a politician of no note who leaves behind no legacy other than in the memories of his family, has been dead for two years. The letter is an attempt at an overture that comes too late, laden though it is with emotional complexity and weight. It is a tender recounting of life with his father—how he and the writer turned out the same and went down separate paths. 

At one point, the letter writer admits: “I suppose that’s how we’d always loved each another with no mutual understanding whatsoever.” There is lots of grudging respect in the ‘narrative’, an outpouring of love deeply affected by a shared, nuanced history. There is also, now, a creeping fear of becoming just like his father and dying like him too.

“Not Yes Not No” is the least straightforward of the three. After a string of ill-suited and short-lived jobs, the narrator has entered journalism and runs an advice column for a newspaper. One day, he receives a long letter from a man narrating various episodes in his life centred on his obsessive and unrequited love for a woman neighbour. Written in first-person, the journalist narrator skims over his background for the first three pages. The rest of the ‘story’ is a reproduction of this long, meandering letter along with the narrator’s corrections, edits, and comments. 

The narrator himself is a noticeable presence, repeatedly interjecting to share contempt for the letter writer, questioning everything from his grammar and language to his actions and behaviour, all for the stated goal of making the letter writer’s meaning clear. Still, in the end, the narrator claims, “I ask, again, that you believe me when I say I’ve hardly changed a thing.”

Letters play a role in other stories as well. There is, of course, the letter that the secret society sends to the protagonist in “Waiting for the Fear” and similar letters the paranoid recipient then sends to those he resents. In “Wooden Horse”, which is about one old man’s fight against a city beautification process, the protagonist is the son of a notable political figure. But he does not command the same attention or power as his late father. 

He writes letters in protest to the local administration, which plans to erect a wooden horse in a square. 

The last story, “Railway Storytellers – A Dream”, follows a troupe of storytellers who live near a small station and sell stories to passengers on trains that pass it. Over time, a new railway line bypasses their station, and their customers keep decreasing. One of the two male storytellers grows sicker until he passes away. The other man, our protagonist, develops feelings for the female storyteller, but she also leaves one day. 

The situation keeps getting worse. It is no longer possible to make a living by writing and telling stories. The protagonist slowly loses touch with reality and the events happening in the larger world outside of the railway station. Slowly but surely, the station, too, fades into obscurity, and the storyteller becomes a relic of the past, producing increasingly incoherent stories. 

Since the trains have long stopped plying to the little station, he worries about how he will connect with his reader, the people he knew, and those who left. His final words are very poignant: “Even so, I wish to write to her, to write for him, to never stop describing things, which is why I want to tell you where I am. I’m here, dear reader. I wonder: where are you?” The story unfolds like a fable, and how it is resolved gives the strong impression of a heartfelt letter addressed directly to the reader.

While the book is quite fascinating in parts, especially on a craft level, it tends to become exhausting and overbearing. There is no variety in plot and narrative when present in the first place. The stories bleed into one another, and this collection is best read slowly with enough breaks. The longer pieces—“Waiting for the Fear”, “Wooden Horse”, “Not Yes, Not No”—are difficult to wade through after a point. Atay’s narrators are also infuriatingly similar, making it feel like you are reading the same story repeatedly but told in slightly different ways. 

Ultimately, Waiting for the Fear is a challenging read with mixed rewards. It is an important work of metafictional literature that can serve as an introduction to a lesser-known but important 20th-century Turkish writer who stood at the juncture of modernism and postmodernism and who continues to wield great influence, the most noticeable being on the work of his countryman, Orhan Pamuk. Atay opened up the possibilities for literature, moving out of traditional ideas and didactic frameworks to a form and diction that better encompassed the chaos of life. 

Through his misfit protagonists, one gets an amplified look at the fear—anticipated or unanticipated, real or imagined, trivial or significant—that seems to have a grip over all of us to some extent or the other as we move in society. Waiting for the Fear is an arresting and surreal portrayal of life and its idiosyncrasies.