PositiveThe New York Time Book ReviewThe author herself has said that the story was inspired by riotous celebrations after a football match: the simultaneously eerie and exhilarating feeling that Tehran is sitting on a pile of matches, ready to go up in flames at any moment ... The deployment of heavy symbolism and allegory to escape censors’ overzealous scissors is an old game, as true in the shah’s Iran as in the revolutionary regime that followed. And while the roiling, earthquake-struck city aptly evokes the spiritual malaise that afflicts this nation of 83 million, there’s a danger in reading In Case of Emergency simply as a political parable. To do so is to jettison its literary and sensual qualities in the name of a facile takeaway. Sheekasteh is the Farsi expression for the kind of visceral, idiomatic slang that characterizes this book’s prose — nimbly translated here by the scholar Mariam Rahmani — but the word literally means \'broken.\' The novel’s most compelling transgression may be linguistic, the tectonic shift it represents in Iranian letters.
