Who is this man Sait Faik, and why is he still revered in Turkey today? What is the immortal legacy that manages to chime across the misty centuries and speak to us with such unerring clarity today?

When Faik died in 1954, he left behind a glittering, serpentine body of work that assured his place in the Turkish literary pantheon. Although he also wrote poetry and journalism, he is best remembered for his eccentric narratives and short stories about people who, like Faik himself, lived peripheral lives in the glorious contradiction that is Istanbul. This, together with the fact that Faik stole the flame of literature from lofty heights and brought it to the streets in a vernacular language, assured his reputation as a visionary of the pen that manifests once in a generation and lights the way for the future. He was, if you like, the Orhan Veli of the short story. He spoke of everyday feelings and experiences to the voiceless proletariat. It is no wonder, Istanbulus gather every May on Burgazadasi, Faik’s island home in the Marmara, to commemorate his short but productive life.

In Sleeping in the Forest professor and poet Talat S. Halman, the man who has probably done more to introduce Turkey’s literary heritage to the world, brings together a representative selection of Faik’s work from a variety of disciplines. Here the reader will encounter short stories, poetry, court reportage and part of a novella. It is an impressive, often surprising and always beguiling collection. It is hoped that aside from bringing ever more readers to sit at Faik’s feet, critical discourse will at last recognise the revolutionary nature of this extraordinary man’s work and accord him the privilege of international recognition.

After reading this collection, a reader’s first observation must be that, like many of the greats, Faik was ahead of his time. His achievements in the elliptical, highly personalised and slyly shifting narratives he produced can only be recognised and properly understood in hindsight. The reader begins to see that, as a homosexual, Faik crossed boundaries and challenged conventions in his personal life as well as on the page. As we will see, he was a gender bender as much as he was a genre bender.

As Süha Oguzertem’s informed introduction points out, Faik did not subscribe to generic forms of writing. Nor did he opt for creating socially acceptable literature. He started with a clean slate and made it up as he went along. To begin with, he will often wilfully appear in his own stories; he might be the detached narrator, a distant observer, the active participant, and sometimes he might reminisce about a deeply affecting experience or relate a story he has heard second hand. As in lyric poetry, it is often not clear whether we are listening to the author’s actual voice or a projection, a persona. Some readers have found this style irritating and confusing, and have laid charges of carelessness and laziness against Faik. But this seemingly anarchic style hides a febrile and flexible mind, one that is in complete control of every subtle shift in nuance. He knows exactly what he is doing. Those that make their peace with this erratic style and persist with Faik will find him bracing in the extreme. They will soon see that the flouting of conventions are a means to a lexical and temporal liberation that has the potential to bring the reader closer to subjective experience.

Faik often reports directly from life, inserting himself into the picture, stepping in and out at will, gliding silently like a camera, only to obstreperously intrude, or shift tense in the middle of a sentence and speak to one his characters. When you take all this into account, you realise that, in many ways, he was the first gonzo journalist. He preceded the new journalism pioneered by Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s by almost three decades, while bringing new immediacy and modernity to the short story. If a writer in an Anglophone country had achieved half as much, his praises would have been trumpeted from the hills. Yet few in the west are even aware of the name Sait Faik, let alone know about his innovations in fiction. Let us hope that this excellent collection with its insightful introductory essays will remedy that criminal oversight.

In the end, however, what remains is the legacy. Humanity, deep feeling, and compassion were hardwired into Sait Faik’s sensibility and it manifests in his every utterance. Whether it be a sensual reverie in a forest, an Armenian fisherman coming home late at night, a Greek girl trying to make the best of a tough situation, or urchins eking a life on mean streets, it is the poetic beat in each syllable that tweaks the heart strings and stimulates the mind. Faik loved Istanbul, a city that housed the world in all its varied complexity. His stories pay tribute to that diversity even as they cast a jaundiced eye toward the mindset that brought its demise. When you read Faik, you read a true original. What comes through is a man who loved people more than flags. He was a utopian visionary whose democratic principles manifest in a tragicomic song about people with dirt under their fingernails. The transforming magic of his waywardly meticulous prose makes them and their city shine.