The solution lay in using the West for his own ends. His subject matter is frequently the detritus of Western culture — translations of tenth-rate historical novels, Hollywood fantasy films, trivialities of encyclopaedias, Turkish tangos. To the fracturing of Turkish life there corresponds the fracturing of language: the flowery Ottoman, the artificial purified Turkish, the rank colloquialism. From the West Atay took one of his favourite motifs, but so changed as to be new, intercourse between people as playing games: the free games of love and friendship, the ritualised games of superficial acquaintance, the mechanical games of bureaucracy.