The Time Regulation Institute

A literary discovery: an uproarious tragicomedy of modernization, in its first-ever English translation

Perhaps the greatest Turkish novel of the twentieth century, being discovered around the world only now, more than fifty years after its first publication, The Time Regulation Institute is an antic, freewheeling send-up of the modern bureaucratic state.

At its center is Hayri Irdal, an infectiously charming antihero who becomes entangled with an eccentric cast of characters?a television mystic, a pharmacist who dabbles in alchemy, a dignitary from the lost Ottoman Empire, a ?clock whisperer”?at the Time Regulation Institute, a vast organization that employs a hilariously intricate system of fines for the purpose of changing all the clocks in Turkey to Western time. Recounted in sessions with his psychoanalyst, the story of Hayri Irdal’s absurdist misadventures plays out as a brilliant allegory of the collision of tradition and modernity, of East and West, infused with a poignant blend of hope for the promise of modernity and nostalgia for a simpler time.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901?1962) was a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, literary historian, and professor. He is considered the most significant Turkish novelist of the twentieth century.

Alexander Dawe is an American translator of French and Turkish. He lives in Istanbul.

Maureen Freely is the principal translator of the Nobel Prize?winning Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk,. Born in the U.S., she now lives in England.

Pankaj Mishra is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose writing appears frequently in the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and the London Review of Books. He lives in London and India.