Özen Nergis Dolcerocca begins her study with an anecdote that describes a Turkish psychologist and a German Marxist rubbing shoulders in Paris. In 1937, Mustafa Şekip Tunç was a member of the Turkish delegation to the International Congress of Philosophy. Walter Benjamin was also present in the audience. Both men were there to listen to an address by the honorary president of the congress: French thinker Henri Bergson, a key figure linking modernist thinkers across continents in this study of modernism and time.

Benjamin, like Bergson, was interested in questions of temporality, although he critiqued Bergson for bracketing all questions of how history and politics affect seemingly subjective experience. The Turkish psychologist, in contrast, was an enthusiastic devotee of Bergson and the latter’s foremost translator in Turkey. In fact, Dolcerocca tells us that Tunç surprised the audience, and presumably Bergson himself, little interested in the political import of his work, by using his address to the congress to state that the new Republic of Turkey had, in fact, been inspired in its foundation by Bergson’s ideas. Although earlier studies have shown the influence of Bergsonianism in non-European contexts and specifically on postcolonial thinkers like Mohammed Iqbal and Léopold Senghor, Dolcerocca uses this moment of “transnational and translational exchange” (p. 1) to show how new understandings of time were central to the modernist literary imagination not only in Western Europe but also in Turkey.

Experiments with narrative time have long been understood as an essential feature of modernist literature, from Marcel Proust’s digressive recollections in In Search of Lost Time to Virginia Woolf’s expansion of a single day in London into an entire psychological universe in Mrs. Dalloway. The central thrust of Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time goes beyond the classic Eurocentric understanding of modernism as a literary movement centered around a few key names in the 1910s and 1920s to show how critiques of dominant time regimes, what she calls “chronometries” (p. 2), were a central preoccupation of writers and philosophers as late as the 1950s—not only in France and Germany but also in the work of non-canonical writers from within Europe (Switzerland) and without (Turkey).

The book’s introduction builds on debates in literary studies, arguing that modernism is not a formal style that began in Western Europe and then spread its influence around the world, but rather “a reaction and response to modernity” (p. 13), and particularly the changes that happened to people’s experience of time under conditions of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and mechanization. This is why certain experimental literary techniques, from stream of consciousness to narrative fragmentation, occur across the works of writers from varied contexts.

Chapter 2, “Bergson, Modernity, and Philosophy of Time in Fin-de-Siècle Europe,” focuses on Bergson as a connecting figure across contexts. Returning to the opening anecdote, Dolcerocca notes that it is particularly ironic for the Turkish psychologist Tunç to have argued that Turkey was inspired by Bergson. Although the latter was a well-known critique of modern scientism, with its mechanistic view of the time and the universe, Kemalism was heavily invested in scientific positivism and normative ideas of modernity and civilization. In this chapter, Dolcerocca outlines the evolution of Bergson’s important philosophical concepts, such as durée (duration) and élan vital, but what is most valuable is her argument about what was attractive about Bergson’s thought to audiences outside of Europe. The author builds on Nazım İrem’s scholarship on “conservative modernists” in Turkey who found in Bergson an “Other West,” or a European Trojan horse that could be used to critique positivism and modern time regimes from within (p. 55). She argues that Bergson’s concept of duration allowed for thinkers outside Europe to reject the view that past is a regressive force in the march to progress. Instead, the survival of the past in the present is part of a universal creative principle; it is the modernist cult of the new that is, in fact, monotonous.

The heart of the book is Part 2, “Chronometrics in the Modern Capital: The City, the Past, and Collective Memory,” which includes a chapter on Benjamin and another on Turkish novelist, poet, and essayist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. It is the comparison of Benjamin’s unfinished The Arcades Project, focused on urban transformation in Paris, with Tanpınar’s Five Cities, essayistic meditations on urban history and the question of the Ottoman past in modern Turkey, that will most appeal to readers interested in Turkish–European encounters. Both Benjamin and Tanpınar were complicated figures, with the Marxist Benjamin deeply interested in the mystical and the messianic, and the presumably conservative Tanpınar much less hopeful for continuity with Ottoman culture and lifeways than is typically presumed. Compiled as one work in 1946, the Istanbul section of the hybrid travel-memoir, narrative-history Five Cities is, Dolcerocca argues, not an attempt to synthesize empire and republic but rather, like Benjamin’s work, focused on the “alienation and fragmentation caused by modernity wherever it touches” (p. 98).

In Part 3, “The Literary Clock and Chronophobia,” Dolcerocca turns to an analysis of two novels. In the first, we return to Tanpınar, this time with a fresh reading of his satirical work The Time Regulation Institute (serialized in 1954). Making an important contribution to Tanpınar studies, Dolcerocca demonstrates that the novel is much more than a critique of secular modernity in the Turkish republic, an interpretation once popular in Turkish literary studies and widely disseminated internationally through Pankaj Mishra’s foreword to the English translation of the novel published by Penguin. Instead, analyzing the book as a whole rather than just its satirical last quarter, she shows that Tanpınar mocks the past as ruthlessly as the present. Whether Islamic or European timekeeping, nothing is exempt from critique. For Tanpınar, as for other conservative modernists, “all regulating, managing, and calibrating systems—be they the religious, ‘authentic’ culture of the Ottoman past or the modern-secular order—[are] essential[ly] the same” (p. 136).

The second novel analyzed, in the final chapter of the book, is Robert Walser’s 1908 work The Assistant, which aligns in many ways with the directly satirical portion of The Time Regulation Institute. Responding to similar conditions of modernity rather than serving as literary precedent or model for Tanpınar, Walser’s novel focuses on the experience of a white-collar worker experiencing the alienation of capitalist labor time and instrumental rationality in the workplace. Much shorter than the two rich chapters on Tanpınar, Chapter 6 illustrates that analysis of understudied European authors (Walser was Swiss German) can bring new insight to the canon also expanded to include Turkey.