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Summary and Reviews of Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Martyr!

A Novel

by Kaveh Akbar
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
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  • First Published:
  • Jan 23, 2024, 352 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Dec 2024, 352 pages
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About This Book

Book 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.

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Reviews

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As a protagonist, Cyrus is rather disappointing; the chapters that follow him, in close third person, are the least interesting of the book. One expects the prose writing of a poet like Akbar to be lively and surprising, but the Cyrus chapters of Martyr!, perhaps crushed by the weight of narrative exposition, mostly left me cold. Luckily, Martyr!'s other characters are more compelling, and Akbar's writing is more playful and stylish when he's not in Cyrus's head. Akbar also includes dreamy, imagined conversations between his characters and historical or fictional ones, like a few pages in which Roya talks to Lisa Simpson or Ali talks to Rumi. And, finally, Cyrus's poems, excerpted from his work in progress "BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx," are really good, brilliant and subtle, so good that I worry I'm underestimating his character...continued

Full Review Members Only (1183 words)

(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).

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Beyond the Book



Iran Air Flight 655

View from behind of relatives of victims of Flight 655, standing on the deck of a boat as they visit location of shoot-down On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a Navy missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, saw on its radar an Iranian aircraft. This aircraft was a passenger airplane, flying from Tehran to Dubai with 290 civilians on board, including 66 children. But the crew of the USS Vincennes identified the airplane as a fighter jet and fired two missiles at it, killing everyone on board.

In the aftermath, the United States deflected responsibility, refused to condemn the attack, and never apologized to the Iranian people. US military officials blamed the pilot and made other attempts to shift accountability. This was during the Iran-Iraq War, for which the US was providing support to Iraq, and the Persian Gulf was full of tension and fighting. ...

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Read-Alikes

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