I would recommend that if you haven’t already, don’t read the synopses (at least the one on Goodreads) for Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. There is just one line of explanation that—if you are very observant and have a good memory—could destroy your experience of the book. Because there is a twist of sorts, and the synopsis needlessly drops a giant clue that is not in the book until much, much later. And now that I have warned you (it seems prudent to put that first), I will share that this book is a recommend from me to you (if you like literary fiction) and also that I am glad I read it. It’s a well-written, interesting book.

Cyrus Shams might have been born in Iran, but he was raised in the Midwest. After losing his mother in an “accidental” airplane incident in Tehran, his father works in a chicken factory in Indiana and disappears into the bottle. Cyrus grows to be an alcoholic and addict himself, as well as a poet obsessed with the ideas of martyrdom and how a life—and death—might have meaning. When a friend mentions an art exhibit in Brooklyn, Cyrus (newly sober and newly orphaned) can’t resist checking it out: a successful painter has terminal cancer and has made herself into her final show.

I read this book because it was a book club read, but I was unable to go to the club where it was discussed. I was glad that I read it, anyway, but I won’t really have any other opinions or the group consensus to share with you. It seemed like it would be a good book. (Either that, or that it would be pretentious and overwrought.) It was a good book. I enjoyed it (which is probably not the right word because the topics are heavy and none of them super cheery).

Let’s first address the structure of the book. I have shared many times before that I like to know the structure ahead of my read, and Martyr! has some different things going on. First of all, though the book is about Cyrus, his is not the only POV in the book. Most notably, there are chapters told from his mom’s perspective. (There are other POVs, too.) Which would lead to our next point about structure: there are significant bits of flashback. There are also short entries from Cyrus’s computer files notes/drafts of his Book of Martyrs. And there are dream sequences which are conversations between people in Cyrus’s life (they are Cyrus’s dreams) and famous people (sometimes even cartoons). But with all this going on, there is a “present” timeline that takes Cyrus from his apartment with his BFF Zee, to Brooklyn and the art exhibit. The flashbacks, different POVs, poems, and dream sequences serve to flesh the plot and characters out.

There are many themes in this book. Maybe it’s dealing with too many, I dunno, but the reader is able to follow all of them. Some of the main themes are martyrdom (life/death/suicide), poetry (and art), alcoholism and addiction (and sobriety), the American immigrant experience (specifically Persian), sexuality, and parents/parenthood. More generally, I guess we’re talking about love and death or love and life. The book is a little more dysthymic than I would normally like. It is also grittier than I usually like. With perhaps too-graphic sex and some of that trendy-trippy drug stuff going on. However, I bought into the whole package here, as it was balanced with levity, imagination, literary play, deep contemplation, and great writing.

Let’s talk about the writing. There is some connection here to Tommy Orange (author of There, There and Wandering Stars). In fact, Akbar and Orange are friends who “riff” off each other and call it “the band.” When I saw that Orange had anything to do with Akbar, unfortunately, I was like—big sigh—it’s going to be one of those sorts of books. (Like super-lauded but, for me, ultimately disappointing.) In the end, I think Martyr! only comes off better for a comparison to Tommy Orange’s works. Their works do have things in common. But I was so much more into Akbar’s writing. It could be because he is really a poet. (He says his first attempt at this novel was a mess and that Lauren Groff “ripped it” apart and helped him figure it out.) His writing is melodious and full of fascinating twists of language, but he also has so much to say. (I underlined a ridiculous amount of quotables.) And in the end, though less straight-forward and more literary and experimental than popular fiction, the poet Akbar pulled it off in a smooth, cohesive, story-telling-adjacent way. So thanks to Groff, I guess.

But we do have to talk about the actual end, as in the book’s ending. I don’t want to get into spoilers, but there are some things that I did see coming too early. And ultimately the ending is ambiguous. As in, you could read this book and your husband could read this book and you could spend hours or days trying to convince each other that this is what happened at the end and laying out all your evidence over and over and there would be no decisive conclusion. So, if you are either a) okay with ambiguous endings or b) so sure of yourself that you can always pick one version and be confident about your decision/reading, then you should still read this book. If you hate ambiguous endings, then you have been warned.

There is a lot of food mentioned in this book. It would be easy to cook to go along with your book club meeting.

Martyr! is a somewhat gritty, trippy, dysthymic, novel that has things to say and to explore but also—to a lesser extent than some—has an actual story. And an ambiguous ending. It’s a real Persian culture-American youth mash-up which I found exciting to read and would be happy to sit around and discuss with a book club or a class or just a friend. I found the writing both approachable and beautiful and though it took me a second to orient myself in the book, I appreciated the alternative structure, the different POVs, the fun dream sequences, and even the times it may or may not be magic realism. I’d say that it’s a real bittersweet book, both tender and sentimental as well as bitter and disappointed. (Not disappointing, but disappointed.) I look forward to Akbar’s next novel, assuming there will be one.

This is Akbar’s debut novel. He is firstly a poet and he has a chapbook and two books of poetry available and has done really well for himself in that world. His poems have been in all the most exclusive places and he’s had a few impressive editing gigs. Awards, too, including the Pushcart.  Martyr! is based somewhat on his own life, but it is still a novel. He’s an editor and professor in Iowa.

Books of poetry:

• Pilgrim Bell
• Calling a Wolf a Wolf
• Portrait of the Alcoholic

Books he’s edited:

• Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance
• The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine

“A drunk horse thief who stops drinking is just a sober horse thief, Cyrus’d said, feeling proud to have thought it. He’d use versions of that line later in two different poems. / ‘But you’re not a bad person trying to be good, You’re a sick person trying to get well,’ Gabe responded” (p13).

“That was the clarity, alcohol, and nothing else, gave. Seeing life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you. But of course a second later it’d zoom past clarity through a flurry of increasingly opaque lenses until all you were able to see would be the dark of your own skull” (p15).

“Cyrus wanted to kick him in the face. For being racist. For being a little right. / ‘I’m not trying to be an asshole,’ Gabe said, his voice softening. ‘But it’s a schtick. It’s a schtick and it’s holding back your recovery. And your art’” (p26).

“What do you, specifically, want from your unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated existence? What makes you actually different from everyone else?” (p27).

“Do you know what the first rule of playwriting is? …. You never send a character onstage without knowing what they want” (p27).

“I’m not uncomfortable sitting in uncertainty. I’m not groping desperately to resolve it. I got four DUIs in a month because I was certain I was in control” (p28).

“’Asking what?’ Curis asked. ‘What were we even talking to?’ / ‘Who cares?’ Gabe answered. ‘To not-your-massive-f*ing-ego’” (p28).

“It was soothing, to stop time and reword memory, imagining through the thesaurus multiverse” (p29).

“Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote. What if everyone was more conscious of this? How would it charge, make more urgent, their living? ‘I have been poisoned, I have only sixteen hours until I succumb’” (p33).

“He hated having to convince people he was both sufficiently immobilized by despair and also doing okay enough to take care of himself and his son” (p37).

“The Shams men began their lives in America awake, unnaturally alert, like two windows the the blinds torn off” (p38).

“When people travel to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff… Nobody things of now as the future past” (p59).

“Every tiny decision becomes mired with importance, and we’re immobilized” (p59).

“But Cyrus was, for the most part, more than a little surprised by the words as they came out of his mouth, how they gave shape to something that had long been formless with him. It was like the language in the air that night was a mold he was pouring around his curiosity. Flour thrown on a ghost” (p75).

“For all our advances in science—chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down—we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew” (p111).

“You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn’t fo that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that” (p111).

“…but there was no ethical consumption under late capitalism and sometimes, Cyrus figured, one had to pick one’s battles. He tried not to think too much about these contradictions” (p112).

“We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sounds stands for this thing, that sounds stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong” (p125).

“But I thought it lucky, the clarity of tears. Instead of the loose riot of confusion and dread webbed up in my chest, in my head, probably wearing lesions in my gut and brain” (p126).

“Cyrus could see it in their chests when they looked at him. It was like Americans had another organ for it, that hate-fear. It pulsed out of their chests like a second heart” (p133).

“The iron law of sobriety, with apologies to Leo Tolstoy: the stories of addicts are all alike; but each person gets sober their own way” (p144).

“Active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness. The story is what comes after” (p144).

“In the back of your brain, your addiction is doing push-ups, getting stronger, just waiting for you to slip up, an old-timer had once told him” (p155).

“That people found the surplus psychic bandwidth to consider—or even worry over—anyone else’s interior seemed a bit of an unheralded miracle” (p176).

“…he was always feeling anxious, anxious about his place in the world, his relative goodness or inescapable selfishness” (p178).

“It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in” (p183).

“The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life over to it” (p185).

“A photograph can say, ‘This is what it was.’ Language can only say, ‘This is what it was like’” (p199).

“It was excruciating, now, for Cyrus to think of himself as the unwitting subject of the same predictable psychic tempests as ever other human on the planet” (p207).

“Cyrus thought about what an aggressively human leader on earth might look like. One who, instead of defending decades-old obviously wrong positions, said, ‘Well, of course I changed my mind. I was presented with new information, that’s the definition of critical thinking’” (p208).

“Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich” (p209).

“See, this is why everyone should just do what I do,’ Zee said. ‘Be right about everything, and shut up about it’” (p218).

“It was one of those billion little sacrifices a parent makes that a child never considers. The kind, Ali thought, only the worst, most loathsome parents ever mentioned” (p251).

“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing ano of that stuff and still avoid doing any good” (p270).

“I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? What can I make of not?” (p270).

“For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink” (p271).

“If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned some cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace” (p279).

“There’s no meeting someone once they’ve been plucked from living. You just live with their absence, whispering ‘jaya shomah khallee’ to a chair on which they might sit, a second unused pillow on the bed” (p280).

“’…please’ and ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’—all you need in any language, really, unless you’re a philosopher” (p281).

“But these lovers didn’t lack the ability to perceive my desires. They lacked faith in my conviction” (p283).

“It happened like it does for anyone, fame. Bullshit luck disguised as a lifetime of hard work. But also vice versa” (p287).

“I resented work for this reason more than any other. The countless paintings that would never exist because I had to be working for money instead of painting. I resented my body for the same reasons, its ravenous gobbling up of time, its constant calibrations, needing to eat, shit, smoke” (p291).

“All of us were dying, I’d remind them. I was just dying faster” (p292).

“’Listen to me. You are not the patient today’ …. It’s a good day when you’re not the patient” (p299).

“Anger is a kind of fear. And fear saved you. When the world was all kneecaps and corners of coffee tables, fear kept you safe” (p302).

“You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus” (302).

“How when he saw a bird or a tree or a bug, Zee really saw that bird or tree or bug, not the idea of it. How he really saw Cyrus, really heard him, beneath all his beneaths” (p320).