The Time Regulation Institute

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.