What makes a life worth living? In Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! “a meaningless life meant a meaningless death”. Martyr! is an astounding debut novel that follows Cyrus Shams as he fumbles his way through his life, through his addiction, through every painful sober day that he has survived.
Iranian-born Shams has recently become an orphan. He’s also in the early years of sobriety. Shortly after his birth his mother was killed by US forces who shot down Iranian Air Flight 655. This tension between life and death becomes an obsession: what is the point of it all? “He felt completely awash in time: stuck between birth and death, an interval where he’d never quite gotten his footing.” Martyr! delves deep by asking: how can we live when death is inevitable?
Cyrus travels from the midwest to New York city, to speak with Orkideh, an Iranian artist, during her last days. She plans to spend this time in a Brooklyn gallery, hooked up to oxygen and painkillers, as she talks to the public about anything they want. Throughout, Cyrus is writing a book on martyrs, which is included in “.docx” snippets from a manuscript in progress. It’s all wonderfully meta, as it becomes apparent that the writer (Akbar) writes a semblance of his own survival through Cyrus, who writes his own semblance through these. docx excerpts. Cyrus also includes poetry where the speakers are famous martyrs: Joan of Arc, Bobby Sands, etc.
Language in Martyr! comes with a kicking-and-screaming determination that is so powerful to read. “I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing.”
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It feels like holding magic in your hands. This is one of the joys of reviewing: to find a book that I loved reading so much that I immediately got up out of my chair and went to tell anybody who would listen (Twitter, Instagram, my husband, the WhatsApp groupchats). What I want to tell the world is: I have no doubt that Martyr! is a prize winner in waiting.
