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One of the greatest and most overlooked novels of the twentieth
century, by an author championed by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk,
The Time Regulation Institute appears here in English for the first
time-more than fifty years after its original publication in
Turkish. This is the story of the misadventures of Hayri Irdals, an
unforgettable antihero who, along with an eccentric cast of
characters (a television mystic, a pharmacist who dabbles in
alchemy, a dignitary from the lost Ottoman empire, the
"life-artist" Halit), founds The Time Regulation Institute. The
institute's quixotic quest: to make sure all the clocks in Turkey
are set to Western time. Thus begins a brilliant satire about the
calamitous arrival of Western and corporate values in
tradition-bound Turkey. An uproarious tragicomedy that is still
startlingly relevant, The Time Regulation Institute illuminates the
collision of East and West, tradition and modernity, that has been
playing out in Turkey since the early twentieth century. AHMET
HAMDI TANPINAR (1901-1962) was a poet, short story writer,
novelist, essayist, literary historian, and professor. He is
considered one of the most significant Turkish novelists of the
20th century. Deeply influenced by Valery and Bergson, he created a
unique cultural universe in his work, bringing together a European
literary voice and the sensibilities of the East. MAUREEN FREELY
(translator) is the principal translator of Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel
Prize-winning Turkish novelist. She lives in England. ALEXANDER
DAWE (translator) is an American translator of French and Turkish.
He lives in Istanbul. PANKAJ MISHRA (introducer) 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.
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 the future and nostalgia for a
simpler time.
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