The book presents itself as the memoir of Hayri Irdal, assistant head manager of the ill-fated Time Regulation Institute and author of the once famous, now infamous (because entirely fake) historical study “The Life and Works of Ahmet the Timely.” Irdal is an earnest if slippery old fellow, who constantly professes his ignorance even while pointing out his accomplishments, and who regularly digresses into side notes that tend to be rather smart. “Sometimes I consider just what strange creatures we are,” he says; “we bemoan the brevity of our lives but do everything in our power to squander this thing we call ‘the day’ as quickly and mindlessly as we can.” The sudden death of his longtime mentor, the entrepreneur Halit Ayarci, has provided Irdal with the opportunity to reflect upon the incredible course his life has taken — a course that resembles at many turns the journey of the Turkish people into modernity — and he now wishes to set the record straight on a number of key points.

What follows is the story of a life unusually indebted to timepieces. First is the grandfather clock that stood at the center of several generations of Irdal’s family history. Next we learn about the loss of personal freedom he experienced around age 10, upon receiving a watch from his uncle. “First the little timepiece nullified my little world,” Irdal tells us, “and then it claimed its rightful place, forcing me to abandon my earlier loves.” But the real turn comes with his apprenticeship to the wise old clock repairman, Nuri Efendi. It is from Nuri that Irdal picks up the various sage one-liners — “Regulation is chasing down the seconds!” — that will eventually catch the attention of Halit Ayarci, on the very first occasion they meet. “Think about the implications of these words,” Ayarci tells Irdal. “We’re losing half our time with unregulated clocks. If every person loses one second per hour, we lose a total of 18 million seconds in that hour. . . . Now perform the calculations and see how many lifetimes suddenly slip away every year. . . . Can you now see the immensity of Nuri Efendi’s mind, his genius? Thanks to his inspiration, we shall make up the loss.” Thus will the Time Regulation Institute eventually be born: from a handful of one-liners transformed into slogans, attributed to a historically fabricated “Ahmet the Timely,” and plastered on posters throughout the land.

I won’t say more here about the elaborate allegory Tanpinar builds around his “Institute” (almost everything I’ve described so far is found in the first 30 ­pages), except that it ends up being the most comprehensive satire of what we would call NGOs and nonprofit organizations I’ve ever read. Nor are regulation and bureaucracy Tanpinar’s only targets, for each character he introduces along the way brings into the book another lofty belief system ready to be lampooned. Alchemy, spiritualism, psychoanalysis, politics, academic theorizing, Hollywood romanticism — at times Tanpinar’s novel reads like an encyclopedia of human folly. And when the Time Regulation Institute is finally founded (more than halfway through the book), it seems no coincidence that the passengers on this ship of fools all sign on as its first employees.

Tanpinar’s comedy is driven more by characters than language. There are not many belly laughs, or even jokes, but rather absurd situations in which hypocrisies are laid plain. At times the story gets baggy with secondary characters and their domestic plots of love and disillusionment, and despite a very lively translation, the Turkish names and honorifics can be difficult to keep straight. In the end, however, none of this gets in the way of the book’s ability to be not only entertaining and substantial but also, for lack of a better word, timely. For beyond the historical relevance, beyond the comic esprit, Tanpinar’s elaborate bittersweet sendup of Turkish culture over a half-century ago speaks perfectly clearly to our own, offering long-distance commiseration to anyone whose life is twisted around schedules and deadlines — pretty much everyone, in other words — provided you can find the time to read it.