Book review: Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is an energetic, maximalist triumph

Martyr!

By Kaveh Akbar
Fiction/Picador/Paperback/352 pages/$19/Amazon SG (

amzn.to/3KalGWG

)
5 stars

At 28, former alcoholic Cyrus Shams’ new life of sobriety is still a cocktail of insomnia and suicidal thoughts. The orphaned Iranian-American poet stares into the abyss, but he does not want to “waste his one good death”.

He is a wannabe martyr – if that word is not too cliched for an Iranian and too incendiary in an Islamophobic world. He wrestles with his fixation on martyrdom by starting to write a book on historical martyrs such as the Indian anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh and Chinese poet-aristocrat Qu Yuan.

Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar, who has written openly about his old alcohol addiction and depression, might have written a protagonist that hews close to his biography. But this brilliant debut novel is not a memoir disguised as fiction – it is a resoundingly contemporary novel of great invention and ideas.

Akbar has fashioned a compelling character in Cyrus from his own experience of a poet’s life adrift. But, like the Persian mirror art of finely cut glass shards he cites, Akbar shatters his own story only to rearrange it into an unforgettable portrait of the downtrodden and righteous Cyrus.

To guard against meaningless life, Cyrus is adamant to avoid futile death. His mother, Roya, died a martyr when he was a mere baby. She was one of 290 people killed on board Iran Air Flight 655, based on an actual event where the United States Navy shot down the passenger flight in 1988. His father, Ali, on the other hand, had died – ingloriously, Cyrus thinks – as soon as his son entered college.

When a dying Iranian-American artist Orkideh stages her last show Death-Speak at Brooklyn Museum, Cyrus goes to New York with his best friend – his Polish-Egyptian roommate – to find her.

Orkideh, fashioned after Serbian conceptual artist Marina Abramovic, would transmute death into a final work of art. Living her last days out and dying in the museum, in Cyrus’ iffy books, qualifies the elliptical artist as a martyr.

In dazzling and inventive form, Akbar tells Cyrus’ story through a multitude of shifting perspectives, poetry, myths, dream scenarios and letters. For this reviewer, who first encountered Akbar’s work through his poetry collection Pilgrim Bell (2021), Akbar’s language achieves an energetic, maximalist flair exceeding what the spiritual poet has hitherto been known for.

Unabashedly literary and philosophical, Martyr! manages to still be a page-turner that is at once funny, heartrending and astute. The book about Cyrus’ little life still pulls off the grandest of novelistic themes: existential dread, heroism, grief, addiction, cultural displacement, art-making, friendship and redemption.

Unmoored from traditional nuclear family kinship and national belonging, the queer and unorthodox web of Cyrus’ relationships is a marvel to follow. This includes the refreshing depiction of his pansexuality – his attraction to people regardless of their gender – and an uncategorisable relationship with his best friend.

Some might fault the final quarter of the book for shifting gears into melodrama. But Akbar depicts the extreme crests and troughs of Cyrus’ emotional waters with an astounding and luminous grace. Akbar’s ending unshackles itself from the chains of worldly language and breaks the surface of the spiritual. The book’s radiant warmth stays long after its final word.

Few contemporary novels manage to be so earthy and transcendent at once like this one does. In an audacious debut, Akbar gives voice to a subjectivity caught between geopolitics and God, political grievance and spiritual grace.

His voice, as the book’s emphatic title does not hide, is a daring exclamation.

If you like this, read:

Joelle Taylor’s The Night Alphabet

(Riverrun, 2024, $32.95, Books Kinokuniya). For those who cannot get enough of a poet’s novel, try T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize-winning writer Joelle Taylor’s ambitious debut novel. Her form is equally inventive, as she uses a woman’s tattoos as a plot device to go on a dream-like romp through women’s history.