The cheekiness of Kaveh Akbar’s title, Martyr! gives us clues about how to read his brilliant debut novel. A jaunty exclamation point undercuts the weight of the word and assuages some of our possible discomfort; it forces examination of our own prejudices; it tacks a “look-over-here” tap dance of humor onto a word with multiple serious meanings and challenges any assumptions that recognize the author’s name as, if not specifically Iranian, then probably Muslim. That fleet footwork is accomplished before we even open the book. Inside, a thrilling blend of political themes; personal agony; magical coincidences; moments of joy; and, above all, the dynamic energy of the writing propel us all the way to the spectacular, ambiguous, technicolor ending.
Sharing many important traits with the young, Iranian-born poet/author Akbar, the main character, Cyrus—a young, Iranian-born poet/author recently in recovery after an obliterating addiction to drugs and alcohol—is a passionate, irreverent, deeply human guide, and although other characters step forward to occupy dreams and/or take turns expanding the multilayered narrative, the book is most compelling when we are in Cyrus’s company. In the defining event of his life, Cyrus’s mother was, shortly after his birth, shot out of the sky in 1988 when a U.S. Navy warship fired missiles at an Iranian passenger jet that killed all 290 aboard. In the fictional aftermath of this real-world tragedy, Cyrus is inexorably drawn to fulfill his narrowly escaped fate alongside the mother he never knew.
With his friend and sometimes lover, Zee, a Polish-Egyptian waiter/musician, Cyrus journeys from a Midwest college town to New York in order to experience the Iranian artist Orkideh’s final performance: he speaks with the dying woman as she spends her last days in the Brooklyn Museum. Is her public and uncompromising death a martyrdom for art? Was his mother’s meaningless death a kind of martyrdom? Is it possible to find significance for his death? Could recognizing and accepting love make him an “earth martyr”? Cyrus works on his own “Book of Martyrs”; he surrenders to and resists suicidal urges; and he struggles with the neither/nor of his existence: neither American nor Iranian, neither assimilated nor belonging, neither straight nor gay, but with one foot planted in this gorgeous, awful world and one planted in the seductive undiscovered country of death.
It’s difficult to overstate the richness of Martyr! For a book that examines the devastation wreaked by addiction, the tedium of recovery, the insidiousness of racism, the demands of living as a true artist, the suffocating regime of Iran, the hypocrisy and cruelty of America, and the effects of inherited trauma, it is also joyful, vibrant, and unforgettable.
Orkideh tells Cyrus a story about how Persian mirror art came to be: the Shah’s explorers bring back massive mirrors from European cities that shatter in transit, so artisans craft the “expensive broken mirror glass” into “incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches…centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection…How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments…and how those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred.” Akbar’s poetic style pieces together all the influences on Cyrus and reflects back a kaleidoscopic art form.
Martyr! is the perfect book club choice: entertaining, challenging, and provocative.
