Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute)

An institute is founded. Its task is to set all the clocks in the city to the same time.

The institute is of no use at all. But the building rises, the staff grows, publications come out, delegations arrive from abroad, and there is even talk of opening branches overseas.

Nobody stops to ask "what are we doing?" Nobody asks, because asking would bring the whole structure down.

Hayri İrdal

The narrator. The book is written in the form of his memoirs.

In childhood he worked beside a clockmaker, and he loves clocks and knows them. Then his life is carried along by a series of coincidences: unemployment, poverty, a period in a mental hospital, a strange lawsuit.

In a coffeehouse he meets Halit Ayarcı, and everything changes. Ayarcı gives him the idea of the institute; or rather, he takes a remark that slipped out of Hayri's mouth and turns it into an institution.

Hayri becomes the deputy director. He gets rich, buys a house, earns respect.

How the institute works

The details are the best humor in the book.

A citizen whose watch is wrong is fined. The fine schedule is graded: it rises with how wrong the watch is. A discount is applied to families who all carry wrong watches.

Hayri is made to write a book about "Ahmet Zamanî Efendi," a clock scholar said to have lived in the seventeenth century. The man never existed. The book is printed, translated into foreign languages, discussed at scientific meetings.

The staff is made up of relatives. Everyone has a title, and the titles keep getting longer.

In the end the institute is wound up, and a liquidation commission is set up for the liquidation. The commission keeps working.

Why I did not like it

I have built systems like this too.

Perfect calendars. Color-coded labels. Three-layer lists. Installing an app and moving all my projects into it, then switching to another app and moving everything again.

While building them I felt as if I were working, and that feeling was genuinely good: I was starting something, progress was visible, the system got a little tidier every day.

Then I used none of them.

Tanpınar tells this through an institution, but what he describes is the same thing I know in myself: the difference between the feeling of order and order itself. The second is boring, the first is pleasant, and the pleasant one easily takes the place of the other.

While reading the book I stopped a few times and looked at my own phone.

The clock at the center

I do not think it is a coincidence.

Measuring time is not mastering time. The institute sets all the clocks to the same time and nobody's life gets better. Everyone is still late, the work still does not get done.

I cannot count how many times I set an alarm, turned it off and carried on. The clock was right. The problem was not the clock.

Loving Hayri

I loved him, and that bothered me.

When he defends himself he keeps giving himself away. As he explains what he did he finds a reasonable cover, and only the reader sees how thin that cover is. The life he tells does not match the life he lives.

He is a likable man. He does not harm anyone, does not want to deceive anyone. And in the middle of all this functioning nonsense, he is more present than anyone.

This is the book's best trick, I think: it pulls you to one man's side, then shows you the thing he is a part of. With a narrator who cannot criticize himself, it makes the reader the critic.

A critique of what

The book is usually described as a "critique of Westernization," and I think that is incomplete.

Yes, setting the clocks is a symbol of the matter of keeping up with the West. But what the institute really describes is more general: the difference between something actually being done and its looking as if it is being done.

This holds everywhere. Not only in the Türkiye of the 1950s.

An honest note about the language

I struggled; I will not hide it.

Long sentences, old words, stretched-out noun phrases. I went back several times to find what a sentence was attached to.

I read a simplified edition and I am not ashamed of it: a book that cannot be read is not read at all. I know I lost Tanpınar's language and I accept that; the alternative was not reading the book at all.

The humor is quiet

You do not burst out laughing. A few times you stop and say "it really is like this."

I think Tanpınar wanted exactly this. If he had wanted to make you laugh he would have written it more easily; he wanted to disturb.

It is around four hundred pages, and the first hundred are the slowest: the institute is not yet being founded, Hayri's childhood and youth are being told. After you get over that threshold it speeds up.