Book Report: Martyr!

13. Kaveh Akbar, Martyr! (2024) (8/1/24)

A writer friend of mine raved about this book on Facebook—a couple of times. The second time, I thought: I obviously need to order it. Which of course I did. And it happened to arrive just as I was finishing my last book, which I wouldn't call a schlocky thriller exactly, but it also wasn't straight "literature." Which this seemed to be. So I figured I'd elevate myself.

And, wow. The author is a 35-year-old Iranian American poet mostly, but now: yep, he's a novelist, boy and how. This story centers on 20-something Cyrus Sham, a recent college graduate in Indiana—and an alcoholic/addict in recovery now for two years. The main establishing details are that he's lost both his parents: his mother in an incident when US armed forces shot down the plane she was flying in "by mistake," when he was very young; and his father, who then emigrated from Iran to the US and found a career working in a high-tech chicken farm, and who died of a stroke once Cyrus was on his own.

Cyrus is depressed, looking for meaning in life. He begins increasingly to see such meaning in martyrdom—in dying a deliberate death—and he's collecting quotes and stories and writing about it. A friend of his mentions an artist who is herself dying, and is using her last weeks to talk to people, having reserved a gallery at the Brooklyn Museum for her final work of art, Death-Speak. She, too, happens to be Iranian. Her name is Orkideh.

The novel itself jumps around in time, and it has various narrators, including Cyrus's father, Ali, and mother, Roya. There are exquisite dream sequences, featuring, for example, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Cyrus's imaginary brother, Beethoven Shams; or Orkideh and President Invective (i.e., essentially, Trump); or Ali Shams and Rumi. 

But perhaps the most through-line chapters are those devoted to Cyrus's mother, Roya—going back in time; and Cyrus's visits to the Brooklyn Museum to talk to the dying artist, about what it means to die, or maybe live—in the present.

I quoted some of the writing here and here. My book is bristling with flags, there are so many beautiful and meaningful passages. Like this, from a self-written obituary:

When the world was flat, people leapt off all the time. There is nothing remarkable about dying this way, but I hope I've made something interesting of my living. An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.

Or this:

What distinguishes grace from everything else: grace is unearned. If you've moved through the world in such a way as to feel you've earned cosmic compensation, then what you've earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There's an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Goodness never enters the equation.

(Whenever I think of grace, I think of hiking in the Berkeley hills, just nearing the parking lot, and hearing this gloriously pure saxophone music: a gift that carried me on. "Unearned" and transcendent.)

It ends up being, in part, a book of philosophy, of investigation, of discovery. Which I love.

And so the last chapter and then the Coda, which in the first instance was outright hallucinatory, and in the second highlighted a secondary character twenty years in the past—well, I won't say I wanted things to be wrapped up, because I didn't. But I find myself still puzzling over their meanings. 

Which—maybe that's life?

In any case, I loved this book. I may have to read the last few chapters again, but that's no burden. (I may want to read the entire thing again, but ditto.) And now: I'm going to leap into Lonesome Dove—for something completely different.