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IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

Mahsa Mohebali

In this prize-winning Iranian novel, a spoiled and foul-mouthed young woman looks to get high while her family and city fall to pieces.

What do you do when the world is falling apart and you're in withdrawal? Disillusioned, wealthy, and addicted to opium, Shadi wakes up one day to apocalyptic earthquakes and a dangerously low stash. Outside, Tehran is crumbling: yuppies flee in bumper-to-bumper traffic as skaters and pretty boys rise up to claim the city as theirs. Cross-dressed to evade hijab laws, Shadi flits between her dysfunctional family and depressed friend - sall in search of her next fix. Mahsa Mohebali's groundbreaking novel about Iranian counterculture is a satirical portrait of the disaster that is contemporary life. Weaving together gritty vernacular and cinematic prose, In Case of Emergency takes a darkly humorous, scathing look at the authoritarian state, global capitalism, and the gender binary. Mahsa Mohebali is an Iranian fiction writer. She is the author of several novels and short story collections. Her short stories have appeared in English in the Guardian as well as the anthologies Tehran Noir and Alive and Kicking: Short Stories by Contemporary Iranian Women Writers. She lives and works in Tehran.

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Book Published 2021-11-01 by The Feminist Press

Comments

Hypnotic. This underbelly tour of a Tehran shaken by both unrest and literal quakes kept me enthralled.

For those of us with received ideas about contemporary life in Iran, In Case of Emergency is a revelation, but that is hardly the only reason to read this brilliant and highly original novel. Shadi, Mohebali's protagonist, is the quintessential antiheroine: sharp-eyed, acerbic, an opium addict, hilariously funny, a sympathetic mess, and we root for her throughout. The desperate search for her next fix juxtaposed with the impending geological disaster of an earthquake creates page-turning tension, but resist turning the pages too quickly, lest you miss the myriad and complexity of flavors. Mariam Rahmani's superb translation is fully evidenced in the precision of detail, the tone of voice, and most of all, the comedy, which is perhaps the most difficult, if not impossible, aspect of writing to convey from one language to another.

This novel, published in Iran in 2008, takes place in Tehran in the course of a day when the city has been flung into chaos by a series of earthquakes. Shadi, the young, disaffected narrator, is less concerned with the disaster than she is with locating her next opium fix. Rather than flee the city with her family, she spends the day traversing it, getting high with various misfit friends and making observations about Tehrani society with her acerbic wit. Her sardonic commentary is interspersed with sensual descriptions of her highs, and of the periodic quakes roiling the ground beneath her. "I wish I could sink, pour into the earth and dance with her," she declares. "Let the tremors crawl through my body. I don't want them to stop." Read more...

A macabre urban carnival of a novel. In Rahmani's inspired, electric translation, Mohebali's portrait of the unmoored offspring of Tehran's educated elite jolts the reader, offering a rare visceral glimpse into contemporary Iran.

Mahsa Mohebali's abrasive main character, Shadi, is looking for a fix while the world is ending in Tehran. With the tunnel-vision of a drug dependency and the carelessness of a self-indulgent young adult, the lens through which we experience the apocalyptic day is skewed away from the apocalypse itself. The build-up of "emergency" in this novel is both internal and external, as earthquakes cause the city to crumble and the desperation with which Shadi needs a hit parallelly crescendo. Through her gritty prose, Mohebali also provides subtle critiques of the underlying structures that finally brought the city to this tipping point (namely, capitalism and restrictive gender norms). A cynical, sometimes facetious critique of the unsustainable forces driving the world, Mohebali's work is a short and wild ride that skillfully brings into focus the messy time of crisis we are all living in.

A brilliant and jarring portrait of contemporary Iran, rife with unrest, drugs, and destruction.

Utterly shatteringI could hardly catch my breath. I read In Case of Emergency in one sitting without meaning to. Every page is a jolt, a catastrophe, a galloping, desperate search among the wreckage of state, family, and gender, hunting for that ever elusive fix. At turns hilarious and deeply unnerving, here is contemporary Tehran as never glimpsed before. Mariam Rahmani's pitch-perfect translation is intoxicatingly energetic, capturing all the poetry and pathos of disintegration. Read this now.