Throughout the twentieth century literary representations of bureaucracy that range from the satirical to the tragic came to constitute a category of novels that developed irrespective of the conventional boundaries of national literature or historical period and to include diverse works, such as Franz Kafka's classic The Trial (1925), the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim's The Committee (1981), and the Albanian author Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams (1981) set in a fictional Ottoman dream archive. These novels, which typically chronicle an ill-fated individual's struggles within a mysterious, burgeoning bureaucracy, provide pointed commentary and critiques not only of the government institutions that form their subject matter but also related topics, which include institutional networks of information and power, censorship, national narrative, and subversion. Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü [The Time Regulation Institute], the final novel by the renowned Turkish author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962), which was serialized in 1954 and published in 1961, falls firmly within this bureaucratic literary tradition with its depiction of a seemingly naive narrator who becomes embroiled in an institution whose mission is the regulation of time. Current scholarship analyzes this novel primarily in relation to Tanpınar's implicit commentary on the Ottoman past and the sweeping modernization reforms implemented by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk after the formation of the Turkish Republic; however, when contextualized with Tanpınar's oeuvre and Turkish literature of the 1950s and 60s, this work proves an anomaly stylistically and thematically in its focus on bureaucracy. Why did Tanpınar buck the literary trend to social realism in Turkey and his own stylistic inclinations in order to experiment in the literature of bureaucracy during this period? What does the novel reveal about the intersection of Turkish politics and literature and the role of the author vis-à-vis the state? Through an examination the shifting politics of the Turkish literary landscape in the 1950s and 60s as well as the comparative canon of the literature of bureaucracy, this paper investigates the timeliness of Tanpınar's Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü and Turkish bureaucracy from a literary perspective.