Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected)

I quit this book twice. I finished it the third time, and I am not writing that as an achievement; I am writing it to say what kind of book this is.

What happens

Selim Işık kills himself. The book begins with his death.

Turgut Özben is his old friend. He gets the news and at first is hardly affected; they had not seen each other for years. Then he starts trying to get to know Selim.

He finds those who knew him: his girlfriend, his housemate, his coworkers. Each tells a different Selim and none matches another.

Then the writings Selim left behind come out: letters, poems, notebooks, a draft of an encyclopedia.

As Turgut reads them he begins to look at his own life. He has a steady job, a home, a wife, a child. And he realizes how stuck he is inside that order.

In the last part of the book Turgut gets on a train. Where he is going is unclear. During the journey he tells his own story to a stranger, and the narrative falls apart there.

Who is a "tutunamayan"

The book has its own definition, given in the form of an encyclopedia entry: tutunamayanlar, those who cannot hold on to life, people who cannot fit into the shape that the order requires.

But Atay does not build this as a literature of victimhood. The tutunamayanlar are not sympathetic. They are arrogant, they think they are smarter than everyone, they finish nothing and carry that like a virtue.

Selim is like that too. As the book goes on it becomes clear what a difficult person he is.

The matter of mockery

The place I underlined most is how the tutunamayanlar tell themselves.

They tell it by mocking. They turn their own clumsiness into a joke. The reason is clear: if you laugh first, someone else laughing does not burn you as much.

I know this all too well. If I have not managed to finish a piece of work, I make it funny as I tell it. If I have missed an appointment I make a joke about my own disorganization, and when the person across from me laughs, I relax.

That joke is a defense. Atay put this defense at the center of the book, and because it is funny nobody notices that it hurts. This is the cruelest side of the book.

And then there is this: the constant need to explain

Selim's letters are long. Very long. He starts telling something, thinks he has not explained himself enough, goes back and explains from the beginning, then explains that explanation too.

On first reading I took this as the author's excess. Later I understood it was a trait of the character.

He is so afraid of not being understood that he never stops. And the more he talks the less he is understood.

Wrestling with form

In the middle of the book there is a hundred-page poem: "Şarkılar." It comes with footnotes, and the footnotes are longer than the poem.

In one section the punctuation disappears completely and goes on for pages. Turgut's inner voice, without stopping anywhere.

Encyclopedia entries, dictionary definitions, letters, play texts come in between.

This is where I struggled. In some sections I was completely lost and did not know where I was.

But those unpunctuated sections gave me something no plain narrative could: how a mind really flows. Jumping, cutting itself off, wandering from the subject, trying to return and failing.

My struggling while reading is not a flaw of the book. It is the very state it describes.

When it was written, what happened

It was published in 1971-72 and got almost no attention. Atay died in 1977, at the age of forty-three.

The book began to be read in earnest after the 1980s and today is one of the most discussed novels of Turkish literature.

This delay fits the subject of the book terribly well, and when I noticed it I had a strange feeling.

Start with lowered expectations

There are two things said most about this book: that it is famous and that it is hard.

Both are true and both were things I should not have known before I started reading.

I opened it thinking I would read a masterpiece. I thought I had to understand. Everywhere I did not understand I felt inadequate, and twice I quit because of this.

The third time I did this: I stopped trying to understand. I skipped the parts I did not understand, did not go back, did not take notes, did not try to follow who said what.

Then the book opened.

My only advice

Do not read to understand, read to recognize.

There will be enough places you recognize, and that is the real matter.

It runs past seven hundred pages. I read it spread over months, and that is fine; the book is fragmentary anyway.