Martyr! A Novel
Ratings84
Average rating4.2
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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This was a fantastic book. I did originally “judge the book by the cover” I thought it was a lighthearted comedic book. Boy was I wrong on that. It is very dark with thoughts of suicide and being a “martyr” but it really is about making your life a life worth living.
The conversations between Cyrus and the dying artist, Orkidah, are the true backbone of the novel. Often very poignant.
This is probably one of the best books I have read in years. Thought provoking and very well written. I wish I had a book club to discuss.
I cannot recommend this book more.
Okay it has been a week later and I am still thinking about this book. It has burrowed into my brain. I have so many questions, especially about the ending. I keep having different theories as to what actually happened and what the clues might have been. No spoilers but all I can say is that it is a great book. Updated to 5 stars. If you live in my brain for a week you deserve it
Cyrus Shams is an unpublished poet, former alcoholic, and recovering drug addict pretending to have terminal illnesses to train doctors on their bedside manner. He's profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally, sad but comes off as a bit of an emo 20-something. As the story opens we find him lying on his mattress that smells like piss and Febreeze and dreaming of becoming a martyr.
Cyrus' mother was in a plane mistakenly shot out of the sky by the US Navy, his uncle dressed as the angel of death to comfort dying soldiers in the field and now wrestles with PTSD, and his father made it to the US to see Cyrus off to college before dying himself. In New York to see an artist installation by a woman named Orkideh who, dying of breast cancer, sits in the museum and answers questions, Cyrus is immediately pegged by her as just “another death-obsessed Iranian man.”
Throw in some dream interludes where Lisa Simpson chats with his mother and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar makes an appearance, one hell of a coincidence, and snippets of poetry and you've got a free-wheeling, debut novel with a poet's careful consideration of language that's still careening all over the place while riding a swelling wave of critical love. A messy, imperfect, but wonderfully ambitious outing.
I honestly don't get the hype surrounding this novel. Is the author part of a clique of glitterati? The language is not particularly beautiful, the plot is barely there, stretched over too many pages, and the themes are, again, nothing to go crazy about.
