BookBrowse Reviews Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

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In this debut novel, an Iranian American poet, struggling with depression and addiction, embarks on a writing project about martyrdom to try to find meaning and grace in his family's lives and deaths.

In Kaveh Akbar's debut novel Martyr!, Cyrus Shams is an aimless twenty-nine-year-old poet living in an Indiana college town. His life is mostly oriented around survival—staying sober, mitigating the sadness and depression he's lived with since he was a child, eking out a living as an actor for medical residents by performing various mortal ailments. But he thinks about death a lot. His mother was a passenger on Iran Air Flight 655, an airplane flying from Tehran to Dubai in 1988 that was accidentally shot down by the United States Navy, who never apologized for their error (see Beyond the Book). All 290 civilians, most of them Iranian, died; Cyrus might have been on the flight himself had his mother not decided against it. After his mother's death, Cyrus and his father moved from Tehran to Indiana, where his father lived unhappily until Cyrus was in college, at which point he passed away, having fulfilled his duty of shepherding Cyrus into adulthood. "My mom died for nothing. A rounding error," Cyrus tells his AA sponsor over coffee. "My dad died anonymous after spending decades cleaning chicken shit on some corporate farm. I want my life—my death—to matter more than that."

An Iranian poet who is obsessed with death is, Cyrus knows, and others remind him, a cliché, but he can't help it: he has an artist's urge to create something from his preoccupations and political passions. He embarks on a writing project about martyrs, people who made their deaths mean something. His efforts form the main plotline of Martyr!, but the novel itself skips back and forth in time, fleshing out Cyrus's family history with chapters from the perspective of his mother Roya, his father Ali, and his uncle Arash, whose unique role in the Iran-Iraq War—to ride on horseback through fields of his dying countrymen, illuminating his own face with a flashlight so that the fallen soldiers would think he was an angel and die with hope and dignity—left him with PTSD. This is a moving portrait of a family who, like many others, were cogs in the American and Iranian machines of death, slaughter, and empire.

Soon, Cyrus's friend tells him about an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum called DEATH-SPEAK, in which the Iranian artist Orkideh, dying of breast cancer, lives in the museum in her final weeks and welcomes patrons to talk to her about death. Cyrus feels an immediate connection to her, as if she's the key to his project, and flies to New York to see her. His conversations with the artist are a little bumbling and confessional and overly effusive. He kind of wants to kill himself, he tells her, but doesn't want to die for no reason, to waste his one good death. "But you're not wasting your dying, you know?" he says." You're here doing this thing, and so your dying actually means something." Later he calls her a hero. "Who knows how many of these people… needed to talk to you," he says. "How many lives will be changed." Orkideh deflects the praise, but is charmed. Their new relationship gives the plot momentum, as Cyrus attempts to learn more about her mysterious past before their time together runs out.

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. In one scene, Cyrus and his friend Zee talk about reevaluating art and media they used to love, and how some of it could never be made today:

"But that's the point, I think… That kind of comedy always exists on the edge of what you're allowed to say at the moment… The Everton window or whatever."

"Overton," Zee said.

"Huh?"

"Overton window, not Everton."

"Oh, whatever… But it's everywhere. I'm constantly afraid to read the books I loved as a kid because I know there's going to be some awful shit in there."

On the next page, Cyrus tells Zee about his plan to ask Orkideh what she knows about his family:

"And what are you expecting her to say?" Zee put the cigarette between his lips.

"I haven't really thought past that first step," Cyrus said honestly.

"I just don't want you to be blindsided," Zee said. "Er, some non-ableist synonym for 'blindsided.'"

"Hurt?"

"Yeah, but also with surprise. Hurt-surprised."

"I appreciate that."

To me this dialogue is stilted and boring; it feels kind of like filler. If it's supposed to be witty and punchy, it could be wittier and punchier; if it's supposed to be a substantial conversation between two men of ideas, it could be more substantial. A lot of Akbar's dialogue in Cyrus's chapters sounds like this—almost funny; almost significant; but not quite either.

That's not to say that Cyrus's plotline with Orkideh isn't engaging—it is. One just wishes there were more tension or wit in his conversations with people, some actual comedic or intellectual back-and-forth. When other people say funny or interesting things, Cyrus can often only respond with "Woah" or "That's a great story" or "That's hilarious." And while there are times when Orkideh and Arash gently push back on some of Cyrus's ideas, Akbar cuts off the conversation before Cyrus is forced to defend or clarify them. There's one great scene, early in the novel, of an adversarial conversation Cyrus has with his sponsor. "I get that you're Persian… But you've probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you've spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life," Gabe tells him. "But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones?" Everyone else Cyrus talks to is gentle and sympathetic with him, to a fault; as the novel went on, I missed the one character who was unafraid to push his buttons.

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. Sections written from the perspective of Roya, who fell in love with a woman while she was pregnant in Iran, and those of Orkideh, whose mysteriousness and self-confidence are a sharp contrast to Cyrus, are especially beautiful. 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; these sections are short and surreal, and allow Akbar, I think, to use more tools from his poet's toolbox than the more straightforward narrative chapters. The dialogue here isn't bogged down by exposition or Cyrus's seriousness; it engrosses and sparkles.

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. I may have found Martyr! to be uneven, but as a complete work—an imaginative, roving, and impassioned one, a book that stretches past the boundaries of what you'd expect it to be—I found it stimulating to think about, and hard to forget.

This review first ran in the January 24, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.