Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
This is a much-hyped book that I’ve heard many people recommend but wasn’t 100% sure I’d like. I’m certainly glad my hold at the library came through and I took a chance on it, because I devoured this novel.
Martyr! is the story of Cyrus, a young Iranian-American poet in his late twenties, recently clean and sober, trying to figure out whether there’s any point or purpose in his life. His childhood was shaped by his mother’s tragic death on Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger flight shot down by US missiles. His father, emigrating with baby Cyrus to the US, allowed his life to be swallowed up by grief and hard work, and died soon after Cyrus started college. Emerging from a childhood marked by loss and young adulthood swallowed up by addiction, Cyrus becomes fascinated with the concept of martyrdom — not so much religious martyrs, as those who give their lives for a person or cause they believe in. He has a vague plan to write a book of poems about martyrs, but what he’s really searching for is the idea of meaning — whether life, or death, can have meaning. His mother’s death was the definition of a meaningless death; Cyrus wants to know what kind of death (including, possibly, his own?) might be meaningful.
The writing here is beautiful, the ideas big and worth exploring. I think a lot of people’s perception of how much they enjoyed this book is tied up in how they felt about Cyrus as a character. If a reader finds him whiny and self-absorbed, as a few reviewers I’ve read did, they probably won’t like this book. I personally loved Cyrus from the first pages and wanted only good for him, so for me it was a completely engaging and absorbing read.
As for whether Cyrus finds meaning, in life or in death … the ending of the book has the kind of intentional vagueness that irritates a lot of readers (and sometimes irritates me!), ending with a scene that begins rooted in realism but turns metaphorical and can be read in a number of different ways. This feels completely intentional on the author’s part: there’s more than one way to interpret the outcome of Cyrus’s quest, because it is, after all, a story. I felt like the author was inviting me to participate in imagining the ending.
I think this will turn out to have been one of my favourite books this year.
