Dangerous Games came out in 1973, yet again without catching the public eye. While the critical response amounted to little more than lukewarm silence, Atay quickly moved on to a second novel. That novel would go on to win the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation’s Best Novel Prize, and be published in 1971 and in 1972, in two volumes. In 1968 he started working on what would become his masterpiece, The Disconnected. During those formative years he worked for literary magazines, made translations, and contributed to an encyclopedia.

In 1952 he began his studies as a civil engineer, but this was on his father’s insistence, and Atay’s heart and mind were set on literature. The only son of a criminal judge and an elementary school teacher, Oğuz Atay was born in 1934, in the small city of Kastamonu, on the shores of the Black Sea. While this almost reads like Atay’s own epitaph, it was never the cry of a clownish figure, of a greenhorn desperately seeking a stage, but of a craftsman who believed that his share of spotlight fell on a desolate set, of a man who believed that he was bound to remain unseen, unread. At some point the narrator can’t help but to wonder where his readers might be. It’s a fitting finale for his only collection of short stories, Waiting for Fear.

Atay finished this piece, the last short story he ever wrote, in September 1977, in London, where he was under treatment for a malignant brain tumor that would claim his life only three months later, at the age of 43. In “Railroad Storytellers - A Dream,” Oğuz Atay’s narrator admits that all he knows how to do is write stories, that even the illusion of starting a new life is forever beyond his reach.

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