A Ramshackle Modernity

‘The Time Regulation Institute,’ by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

By MARTIN RIKER

The New York Times - January 3, 2014

We’re having a particularly good season for literary discoveries from the past, with recent publications of Volumes 1 and 2 of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s “Leg Over Leg” (1855), the marathon translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s 2,600-page “Zibaldone” (1898) and now “The Time Regulation Institute” (1962), the second great novel from Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. They arrive, such books, in a category all their own, in one sense new, in another sense old, as if to remind us that this thing called literature is much larger than our own little moment.

 Tanpinar (1901-62) was a formative figure in modern Turkish letters, although 50 years after his death, his career in English is just getting off the ground. His monumental “A Mind at Peace” (1949), which Orhan Pamuk has called “the greatest novel ever written about Istanbul,” found its way into English in 2008. Set just before World War II, it conjures on a vast scale the world of Istanbul during the early Turkish Republic, a time when modern Western values were abruptly imposed upon a people and a culture unprepared for them. The ramshackle modernity that resulted, in which Ottoman history and tradition were largely written over, became Tanpinar’s lasting subject: the “void,” as he once described it, of a people “suspended between two lives.”

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