The Tragedy of a Nameless Writer

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I have no name! I am a novelist, a nameless novelist! If you have no name, what you have to say doesn’t carry much weight either. And yet I owe a great many things in my life to literature, while literature owes me my whole life. Now one more debt has been entered against its name, yet it is my burden that has grown heavier still. Today, for the first time, I took part in a book fair. In my own home town, overlooking the sea, in a makeshift space converted from a tent, in the farthest corner of a long display rigged up from coffeehouse tables and crammed with a dozen writers from my home town, as unknown as I am, with the copies of my books that I bought from my publisher at a forty per cent discount laid out in front of me, I wait to be noticed by people who ignore me as if I weren’t there, as if I had never existed.

Entering the fairground with two big cloth bags full of books in my hands, like a pedlar hawking goods off the customs auction, I was carefully arranging my books in the couple of hand-spans of space allotted to me while the old man sitting right beside me was sticking banderole stamps onto the backs of the poetry books he’d had printed at a print shop. Before I had even had the chance to sit down on the white plastic chair that would keep me company all day, I found myself the helpless audience of a one-sided conversation. The old man talked about himself at great length: about his home town, his grandchildren, his half-century as a folk poet and, most of all, about his syllabic metre. A friend of his had once written a twelve-syllable line by mistake, and he had made the poor soul wish the ground would swallow him. He talked and talked; there was no end to him. About an hour later he went to the toilet, and I got the chance to meet the other writers on the display as well. They were all good people; they welcomed me kindly enough.

Towards noon the fair began to get crowded. People drifting half-heartedly round the stands as if on some compulsory museum trip had started to pass in front of our display, if only in ones and twos. Then the old folk poet set about calling out to them. “This way, sir, we have poems, sir, read a few, sir, no need to buy, sir, if you don’t like them you needn’t buy them, sir…” This ceremony went on for roughly an hour; tirelessly, unflaggingly and fruitlessly. By the end of that hour he had managed to sell just two books, and that only by latching on to the relatives who had come to visit the lady sitting on his other side. What’s more, he sold the same book to one of them for fifty lira and to the other for sixty.

As time went on, the fairground filled to bursting, but I, alas, sat at my table twiddling my thumbs. Watching closely, I became certain that most of the people were using the fair as a place to get out of the sun; they gathered in little crowds only in front of the big publishers’ displays and then, like sour-faced old folk who go round the market stalls looking for something cheaper, something fresher, they left the fair empty-handed and with discontented faces. In the afternoon my immediate family and a few close friends came to visit me; although they had already ordered it, they bought my novel all over again; I scribbled stock phrases and signed my name with care for them. My father-in-law bought books not only from me but from every local writer at the fair, to show his support. A dolled-up little auntie of a writer, whose every movement made it plain how sluggishly she was climbing the ladder she had propped against sixty, asked about my father-in-law with great curiosity; she took him for my father; what did he do, what a polite man he was, he hadn’t snubbed anyone or passed anyone by, was he a member of the council or something, perhaps… “An ordinary man,” I said, “just someone who has managed to stay ordinary in this age of show.”

Later on, at odd intervals, more than ten people came and looked over my book, and every one of them without exception glanced at the book in passing, then looked closely at my face and asked, “Tolga Abi’s son, isn’t it?” Their aim was less to read a book than to support their Tolga Abi’s son. Sadly, I was not the person they were looking for. Sadly, I say, because as every one of them who didn’t get the answer they were after tossed my book aside like some worthless trinket, I truly wished, for a moment, that I were the son of that famous Tolga Abi. Only a cotton-haired, honey-tongued auntie who looked like my late grandmother bought my book. For a while she argued with me over whether or not I was Tolga’s son. I have no doubt that, had names not come into it, she would have convinced me I was Tolga’s son. She bought my book all the same; she was very sweet, she felt sorry for me, and I felt sorry for myself, oh, how sorry I felt for myself! A little later the famous Tolga appeared on the scene; a talkative, cheerful, well-spoken gentleman. He was the chairman of such-and-such a home-town association, apparently; I couldn’t place him. His son was nowhere around; I asked where he was. He was cross; according to him, he had begged his son, but since nearly all his books had sold, the young gentleman hadn’t been inclined to come. Sure enough, there were only a few books left on his table, and those too sold before long; the curious thing was that Tolga Bey signed the books in his son’s name.

I was as fed up as if I were on a visit to relatives I had been dragged along to by force. I flung myself outside and bought a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from the kiosk just behind the fair. I went out to the shore and perched on the rocks; opening the packet, I had trouble getting off the foil wrapped round the cigarettes, but I managed it in the end and took one out. Shielding it from the wind with my left hand, I lit the cigarette and drew the poisonous smoke into my lungs. In that moment I imagined myself inside a Nuri Bilge Ceylan film; the ember lengthening at the tip of the cigarette in my hand, the waves breaking and foaming against the rocks, the cries of the gulls, the mingled noise of people and, in spite of it all, the deep silence in my heart. Why, I asked myself, and I had no answer. I looked for a long time at my hands, both of which can hold a pen; at my plump, knobbly fingers… It was as though they didn’t belong to an artist. Perhaps I wasn’t as good as I had thought; perhaps, whatever I did, I would never be any good. Even the cigarette in my right hand, its ember grown long, looked out of place between my fingers. I crushed first the cigarette, then the whole packet, and threw them onto the rocks, and sent the lighter after them. When I turned round, I found myself face to face with the bin the council had put there for the likes of us. I felt worse than I had ever felt, as though every move I made to untangle a ball of yarn knotted tight only dragged things into a more hopeless mess.

When I went back inside, a poet friend of mine had come to visit me with his family and was looking around for me. I went over to him and we chatted on our feet; we talked less about my novel than about his poetry collection that was coming out soon. As he was leaving the fairground, his last words were, “Don’t let it get to you.” Although I hadn’t complained to him at all about the state I was in, I suppose my look laid my frame of mind plainly bare. “Don’t worry,” I said, but it would get to me; there was no way it couldn’t. I saw them off and went back to my place. This unexpected exposure, a guess I had thought impossible, rubbed salt into everything that had happened during the day; I felt like a pitiful wretch now. And yet my mother always used to say, “A broken arm stays inside the sleeve,” and she urged me to keep things to myself so as to stay strong. So silence alone, it seems, is no veil for one’s feelings.

I gathered up my books and filled the bags, lifted them into the air and weighed them roughly; they had lost nothing of their morning weight. I put the bags on the table and waited a while, watching everything around me one last time. I looked people straight in the eye; perhaps we could settle the account that way, but it didn’t work; I was still invisible to them. I sat back down in my place, and the bags stayed on the table just as they were.

There it is: I have been thinking for quite some time now, and in a very small part of that time I have told you all this, while the other, long part went on blaming the friends who left me here alone and, most of all, myself. I had done something wrong; what, I don’t know, but I just hadn’t managed it. I think people believe I’m mad. All this labour, all this effort… And for nothing in return… They’re not entirely wrong, but what they don’t know is that, in the middle of all this rot, it is if I didn’t write that I would go mad!

Now I am walking away from here without looking back, and the books in the bags I’m gripping are not my only burden; this time I have also shouldered my disappointment, the things I have given up, my regret and, most of all, an experience that is bitter but will make me stronger. I came here a nameless writer and I am leaving a nameless writer, and a somewhat hopeless writer at that. My presence here will leave no trace in anyone’s mind. At most they’ll say, there was some young lad; what was his name, I don’t remember either, oh well, what does it matter anyway!

This story received an honourable mention in the Tahta Gemi International Short Story Competition (2026). Translated from the Turkish.