Wake It Up - A Short Story by Payam Nasser - Translated by Sara Khalili 2019- included in The Book of Tehran: A City in Short Stories introduced by Orkideh Behrouzan

Wake It Up - A Short Story by Payam Nasser - Translated by Sara Khalili 2019- included in The Book of Tehran: A City in Short Stories introduced by Orkideh Behrouzan  

"A city of stories – short, fragmented, amorphous, and at times contradictory – Tehran is an impossible tale to tell. No single depiction would suffice; and yet, over-simplified accounts of Tehran abound in Western media: from click-bait clichés about veiled women to images of a youth in revolt, from the colourful elegance of Tehran’s emerging fashion scene to the belligerent rhetoric of international tensions. Tehran’s political representation on the global stage has been marred by the post-war-on-terror misfortune of depicting everything in black or white. There are, however, many stories in between these simplifications, where ordinary life takes place across a multitude of fragmentary scenes and in the messy grey area that anthropologists call lived life." From the introduction 

Today's story, "Wake It Up" by Payam Nasser, is narrated by a professional writer whose long time girl friend has just left to move to America forever. He has long thought a writer requires tragic life events to achieve depth in his work.   All he feels however is a desire to sleep 14 hours a day. Then he decides it might motivate him out of his lethargic state to move.  This sets in motion an encounter with a young boy that will give him a depth of concern for others and ability to see into possible futures he never had before.

The more I read on in "Wake It Up", the more I was captivated by the strange boy.

Born in 1969, Payam Nasser is an author and screenplay writer. His debut collection of short stories, Consternation (2012), was a finalist for the Golshiri prize, as well as the Haft-Eghlim Literary Award for the best short story collection of the year. It also featured the story, ‘Wake it Up’, which received the 2014 Houshang Golshiri Literary Award. He is author of one novel, The Trifles Thief, as well as numerous screenplays, including the film One Long Day, which was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the International Orthodox Film Festival in Russia in 2015.

Mel Ulm