Mahsa Mohebali

I -wanted- to like this book, but it didn’t work out. A story from the point of view of a wealthy yet low-life young woman hipster / drug addict in 2005 Tehran -sounds- interesting, at least to me. But it just seemed tedious and unpleasant and after 60 pages or so I didn’t see any sign of hope that it would become more compelling. It’s a short book so what I read was more than a third of the novel.

Here’s the NYT review that prompted me to try it out:

rel="nofollow" target="_top">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/books/review/mahsa-mohebali-case-of-emergency...

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One night the tremors just started - Earth seems to be trying to dislodge Tehran from its place, throwing one earthquake after another - none of them being the big one but everyone panics that it is coming. So as the morning dawns, everyone is preparing to leave the city and flee to somewhere safer. And in the middle of that, Shadi, a young woman from a wealthy family, decides that she needs to find drugs - he stash is very low and she is about to go into withdrawal. So while everyone is leaving, she dons male clothes and goes out to see if she can find her friends (and dealers).

While the city slowly (and not slowly) falls apart around her, she leads us on a tour across Tehran - from visiting a friend who chose that day to try to kill himself again to her oldest friend. And while we watch the crowds, we get the backstory of addiction and neglect, of revolution and resistance. Once upon a time, her mother was saved from being arrested during the revolution by Shadi's father - a university professor who is more interested in his students than in his family (we never get to meet him, we only hear of him). They get married, have 3 kids (Shadi is the middle one, the only girl) and still live together in the big house (complete with the paternal grandmother (which is losing her mind) and her maid (who does not speak Farsi)). But while they are comfortable at home, their children end up as different from each other as possible - the oldest is the Golden boy, Shadi is an addict and the youngest is a drug dealer (but not of opium which is Shadi's poison).

So here we are, at the start of the day in which everyone flees Tehran, with Shadi on a hunt for her drugs. Remove Tehran and you get Patrick Melrose's chase of oblivion in Edward St. Aubyn's Bad News - the two novels are very similar in their tone and in the self-destructive behavior of the main characters, both of them having grown up wealthy (Shadi was never abused - so her falling into the same trap has other reasons). I am not sure if the author read St. Aubyn's novel and got influenced by it or it is one of these weird cases where two authors get the same idea (St. Aubyn is partially writing from experience and real life stories tend to repeat themselves).

Somewhere in that mad dash across Tehran, we see Iran in a light which we rarely do - depression, addiction and apathy combined with the old revolutionaries (now parents and grown up) make up a picture which apparently was bad enough for the book to be censored a few times in Iran.

Talking about censorship, the translator's note made me raise my brow a bit. The novel is full of coarse and vulgar language (Shadi is especially foul mounted but so are all the people who she meets) which is very different from any other Farsi novel I had ever read. As it turned out, the original has a lot less of it because the censors would not have allowed it so the translator made the choice to add to the language and make most of the word choices coarser, partially to de-censor the book and partially because the America audience that she was translating for is used to a lot coarser language and she was looking to translate the meaning and depth of difference - which will be lost if the novel stayed at the level it was written in Farsi. My first reaction to this explanation was negative - but I had been thinking about it and it does make some sense -- translating cross-cultures sometimes loses the cultural impact and in this novel, this is important. The author was apparently consulted but how much the translation matches the intent is not entirely clear.

So did we get a translation or an interpretation of this novel into English? That may be a bit debatable. I suspect that a different translator may look at this differently and make different choices. But at the same time, looking at the novel as a whole, it suits the narrative - in the ears of someone who reads mainly Western books anyway. It is designed to shock but then the shock thresholds are different and the translation tried to reach the same one, despite the cultural differences.

I ended up liking the novel - not because Shadi is especially likeable but because she is not. She is a lost rich girl which just happens to live in Tehran where she needs to dress as a man to move freely and where if you have money, drugs are everywhere (there are some notes about the opium issues in the country in the same Translator note I was talking about above). And that is what makes this story work for me - she is in a different place, some of the things she does are different but at the same time it is a story that can happen anywhere, making the locality one of the main characters.

We never learn how the story ends - the novel has an ending because the drug-finding trip ends but the bigger story is wide open. It feels like we saw the story of one person in the big city and if we zoom into another one, we can get another story. And another. And over them all is the Tehran falling apart - from the tremors in the novel but they are pretty easily seen as a metaphor for the problems of the real city - at least if one so wishes to see them.

An interesting novel about the side of a country we do not hear much about - the news reports are full of stories of Iran but as any other country and culture, what it shows to the world is just one side of the story. How realistic this novel is is beyond the point - there are enough parts that click well enough to ensure that you know that it is not all invented, even if all characters and actions are.… (more)