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Synopsis:
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.
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 Tehran 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.
Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
Review:
After publishing a few acclaimed poetry collections, Kaveh Akbar’s first novel, Martyr!, is to be released later this month. The novel starts with Cyrus Shams, a poet, recovering drug and alcohol addict, and someone is trying find meaning, not only in life but in death. His mother is killed in 1988 on Flight 655, an Iranian commercial flight shot down by the United States military. He is a baby at the time. Afterward, he and his father move from Iran to Indiana, where his father worked at a chicken farm. Cyrus grows up, but he does not grow out of the feeling of his mother, and eventually the death of his father as soon as he goes to college. Martyr! is Cyrus’s journey post family and post drugs to figure out if his mother and father’s death has meaning at all. This journey leads him to the idea of writing a book about martyrs, which leads him and his friend Zee from Indiana to Brooklyn, where an Iranian-born artist is publicly dying of breast cancer. She is at the Brooklyn Museum meeting people every day to talk about whatever they want until she eventually dies. Her hospice is on display for art. Cyrus wants to know if her death is art, thus making it more meaningful than other deaths. Meeting her changes everything for him.
This story is not straight forward or complete. We are given large chunks of the story, not only Cyrus’s life, but the life of his parents, what his mother felt when she was boarding the plane on her fateful trip, how military service messed up Cyrus’s uncle, and how his father felt after losing his wife, but we are also allowed to fill in the blanks. Chapters are written from the perspective of everyone, from Cyrus, from Cyrus’s mother, father, and uncle, and from the dying artist herself. There are chapters that are fictionalized conversations between famous people that Cyrus uses to help him fall asleep at night (which we could have used a few more of these). We are also given snippets of the book of martyrs that Cyrus is writing: poems and paragraphs explaining the depths of what death can mean. Cyrus has collected all of these pieces, and he hopes this can mean something.
The writing is fantastic, and the story is gripping. I was more invested in these characters and this story than any other book in a long time. There are some moments when Kaveh Akbar writes very deep conversations between two characters and the narrative does seem to stall a bit, but most of the novel is flawless, exciting, and quite possibly one of the best books I will read this year.
I reviewed this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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