“How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it? Stop trying to make everything mean something.”

Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar

Summary

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.

My Thoughts

This book was a stupendous read; it honestly knocked me out. I didn’t know what to expect going in, but I got this book as a birthday gift and read it in the days right after. I had see Booktuber Jack Edwards mention it, and I generally enjoy his recommendations as well. From the start, Cyrus hooked me in. His inner narrative was depressing at times, looking for meaning in a newly sober world and reckoning with his tragic past, but it was also full of incredible humor and levity. He is painfully self-aware at times, like with his addiction, or how he is perceived as an Iranian man, but other times painfully oblivious, like with his relationship with his lover and best friend Zee. We see not just his POV, but the POV of his father, uncle, mother, and best friend, all of whom had depth to the narrative as we see their own lives unfold separate from Cyrus’s, while learning how their lives have affected how Cyrus perceived them. We as the readers know things that Cyrus does not, adding a different layer both to our reading of the book and to our understanding of Cyrus.

The structure of the book alternates between chapters from Cyrus, from the people around him, in Cyrus’s dreams (with dialogues between fictional and real people in his life, like Lisa Simpson, or his father), and snippets from the book Cyrus is writing. The author’s background in poetry shines in the pieces he writes about different martyrs, all as part of Cyrus’s book on martyrdom that becomes the backdrop for Cyrus’s journey to finding meaning. The book grapples with themes of grief, martyrdom, sobriety/addiction, family, race, art, and so much more. Akbar is honest about the fact that he does not always know the answers to the questions he is asking; the book is as much an exploration of these themes as it is a series of questions for the readers to ponder. Cyrus explores emptiness and tries to figure out how to fill it now that alcohol and drugs are out of the question. He is familiar and yet unfamiliar with love, struggling with his art, and both kind and selfish at the same time. His story is also grounded in his Iranian heritage. I learned a lot about Iran, the Iranian Revolution, the Gulf War, and the culture from the perspective of both men and women through the narratives of Cyrus’s relatives. The language is lush, full of unique descriptions that harken to the author’s past in poetry in their beauty and the way they flow, but also describe things in a way that makes you sit back and look at it in a whole new way. One of my favorite quotes is from Cyrus’s uncle:

“I have heard people say smell is the sense most attached to memory, but for me it is always language, if language can be thought of as a sense, which of course it can be. Compared to even the dullest dog humans smell nothing. But compare is with—what?—a monkey who can say “apple” with her hands?—and we are the gods of language, every thing else just chirping and burping and how fitting, too, that our superpower we a species, the source of our divinity, stems from such a broken invention.”

This is not the perfect book; the narrative can be inconsistent, oscillating between downturns and humorous moments that feel extremely jarring (see the mention of Lisa Simpson in a dream dialogue above), but it overall has a steady pace. It definitely picks up towards the end, as the pieces start coming together. It is very introspective in a beautiful way, and draws from real history: the real-life murder of Iranian Flight 655 when the US navy launched missiles at a passenger aircraft in 1988. It was also slightly predictable, at least to me; my friend who read it was astounded that I predicted the ending of the book perfectly, but it all came together for me around the 200 page mark. Cyrus shares many characteristics with other lost-in-life protagonists from literary fiction—this novel reminded me a lot of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, including the queer themes and how they interact with race. This did not take away from my reading experience, but rather showed how carefully Akbar foreshadowed his story and laid out the plot points. I overall highly recommend this book. It’s an amazing debut novel, beautifully written, and full of lush history. This is a book that you are meant to think about, meant to bring to book clubs and discuss with others.

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