Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar was super good! As I wrote in my blog about the 2024 Faith & Writing Festival, I had not heard of Kaveh Akbar before, but apparently, many others had. His session at the Festival, “What can Spiritual Poetry Teach us About Living?” was chock full. People were sitting in the aisles. He also had a conversation with Christian Wiman, which was phenomenal. About this book, the New York Times review said:

Cyrus Shams, the aching protagonist at the heart of Kaveh Akbar’s incandescent first novel, is a veritable Rushdiean multitude: an Iranian-born American, a “bad” immigrant, a recovering addict, a straight-passing queer, an almost-30 poet who rarely writes, an orphan, a runner of open mics, an indefatigable logophile, a fiery wit, a self-pitying malcontent. But above all else Cyrus is sad; profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally sad. ``New York Times Book Review, “A Death-Haunted First Novel Incandescent With Life” by Junot Diaz. January 19, 2024. UPdated December 3, 2024.

I had to wait quite a long time to get it from my library, but it was worth the wait. Since I can’t underline a library book, I dog-ear the pages I think I’ll want to quote here in my blog. I got carried away with this one. Some samples:

“Have you been listening to me at all?” Cyrus asked. “I don’t even know what my higher power is.”

“That didn’t stop you from getting on your knees a year ago and asking it to remove your suffering.”

“Asking what?” Cyrus asked. “What were we even talking to?”

“Who cares?” Gabe answered. “To your not-your-own-massive-fucking-ego. That’s the only part that matters.” ~~page 28. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright 2024 by Kaveh Akbar.

God as “not-your-own-massive-fucking-ego.” OK. That works.

There were two campus cofee shops at Keady. One, Bluebarn, featured single-sourced beans, baristas with self-serious framed certificates advocating their training at “Espresso Academy,” and beautiful mid-century modern furniture. Every time Cyrus had been there, the baristas were almost off-puttingly friendly, Stepfordian. He’d felt tempted to ask for his coffee with just a splash of misanthropy, please. Or at least sullen ambivalence. Their eagerness felt offensive, too much to bear.~~p. 71

“Stepfordian.” “a splash of misanthropy, please.” Smile. So good.

I have read many passages that are rhapsodies to language. Here, a different perspective:

And how fitting, too, that our superpower as a species, the source of our divinity, stems from such a broken invention

It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn’t come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqui and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an offficer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of hiw own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all those invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.~~p. 125

“…strutting around, certain as roosters.”

“See, this is why everyone should just do what I do,” Zee said, “Be right about everything and shut up about it.”~~p. 218

Oh, how I try to “shut up about it.”!

That’s when everything became supersaturated. One of those memories you can squeeze like a rag and watch details dip and pool.~~p. 262

What a way to describe those “supersaturated” memories.

A character named Orkideh writes:

What I want to say is that I was happy, not always, not even mostly. But I did know real, deep joy. Maybe everyone gets a certain amount to use up over a lifetime, and I just used my lifetime’s allotment especially quickly, with Leila. But I don’t think it was a tragedy, my life. Tragedies are relentless. Nobody could ask for more than what I’ve had.~~p. 294

Who can you substitute for Leila, who was in your lifetime’s allotment of joy? Me: Dad, Dan, Mom.

Orkideh also said, “When I say ‘nations,’ I mean ‘armed marketplaces.’”~~p. 316. Hmm.

These are samples of some of the wondrous writing. The story is also wonderful. It reminds me just a little bit of Catcher in the Rye. It could be argued that the main character there, Holden Caulfield, is searching for meaning and finding hypocrisy, smallness of spirit, and he is full of scorn. Cyrus does not scorn what he sees, but he is searching for meaning, not just of life but also of death. He wants his death to matter.

It may sound morbid and depressing but it isn’t. The characters are interesting and people you like getting to know. Cyrus sees grace everywhere.

SPOILER: The ending is unclear. Cyrus and his friend Zee are by a pond and he “reached his hand into the pool and closed his eyes. He felt another hand—was it his own, or Zee’s?—grab it.” I thought of the Narnia book where the children went to different worlds through ponds in a woods. In this case, was it a dream? Is it a metaphor for Cyrus and Zee’s death? Suicide? I read lots of speculation. I don’t know. But that is okay.

Loved the book.