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A Novel
by Kaveh Akbar
Book Reviewed by: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.
Not All of His Problems Are a Performance
Cyrus Shams
Keady University, 2015
Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over. Clarification. Lying on his mattress that smelled like piss and Febreze, in his bedroom that smelled like piss and Febreze, Cyrus stared up at the room's single light bulb, willing it to blink again, willing God to confirm that the bulb's flicker had been a divine action and not just the old apartment's trashy wiring.
"Flash it on and off," Cyrus had been thinking, not for the first time in his life. "Just a little wink and I'll sell all my shit and buy a camel. I'll start over." All his shit at that moment amounted to a pile of soiled laundry and a stack of books borrowed from various libraries and never returned, poetry and biographies, To the Lighthouse, My Uncle Napoleon....
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
(1183 words)
(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).
Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed
I can't remember the last time a book made me feel like this. Martyr! is simply extraordinary. The language moves across the page like a symphony, and the story vibrates with an energy that made the book impossible to put down. Kaveh Akbar has written a novel that will stay with me forever. What a story. What a voice. What a gift. John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars
A brilliant and blisteringly alive novel about not just how we go on, but also why. Kaveh Akbar's first novel is so stunning, so wrenching, and so beautifully written that reading it for the first time, I kept forgetting to breathe. I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life. Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful. Martyr! is the best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness for people longed for but forever unknown, the way art as eruption of life gazes back into death, and the ecstasy that sometimes arrives—like grace—when we find ourselves teetering on the knife-edge of despair.
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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