Martyr!

 “He is the most excited person I have ever met,” Kaveh Akbar’s wife said about him in a NYT feature.

You see this in Martyr!, for sure. The book looks at this, then that, then something else with equal intensity. I’m fascinated by the structure, which is all over the place but works. There’s the story of Cyrus Shams, a young talented but unproductive poet, recently sober and obsessed with the idea of a death that matters. Which is weird because, isn’t it more likely to want a life that matters, something that makes (or should make) death have less sting? He cares about that, too. But he’s depressed and suicidal and before stopping he’d drunk so much, he’d irreparably damaged his liver—so, at the moment, a death that matters seems more likely than a life that does.

To say Cyrus is a hot mess is an understatement. This guy has had a tough life. His mother was killed in a plane crash not long after he was born and his father fled with him to Fort Wayne, Indiana (of all places!), where he worked in a chicken farm until his early death. Alone, adrift, after years of substance abuse, Cyrus is full of free ranging anger at what life’s given him and—when he’s lucid enough to think straight—at himself. There are people who care deeply for him, people he continually disappoints, especially his friend Zee, whose love saves Cyrus again and again and also terrifies him.

Love is just not something he feels he can depend on. Plus, the cost!

There’s so much going on in Martyr! Cyrus’ story alone is a lot to keep track of! An Iranian growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, coming of age in the aftermath of 911. Grief about his mother’s death, guilt and sorrow about his father’s life, the constant stress of trying to make ends meet, his debilitating distrust of love. This larger story unfolds in third person over the course of the novel, interspersed with first-person narratives by his father, his mother, Zee, his Uncle Arash, and one other character I won’t mention because it would give something crucial away. Each of those stories might have been its own novel.

There are dreams involving his mother and Lisa Simpson; his father and Rumi; and his imaginary brother Beethoven and Kareem Abdul Jabaar.

Poems and bits of prose from Book of Martyrs, by Cyrus Shams.

Snippets of news stories and government documents about the plane crash in which his mother died, an actual plane crash that occurred in 1988. Allegedly mistaken as a jet fighter, it was shot down by a U.S. Navy warship.

All of these things are in place, keeping Cyrus in a state of emotional paralysis. Then his friend Sad James shows him a social media post: “Internationally renowned visual artist Orkideh presents her final installation, DEATH-SPEAK. Visitors will be invited to speak with the artist during the final weeks and days of her life, which she will spend onsite at the [Brooklyn] Museum. No appointments necessary.”

To now, Cyrus has been noodling around with the idea of a book about martyrdom, a way to collect, explore and understand life and death. He and Zee set off immediately.

“My God, I just remembered that we die./But—me too?” Clarice Lispector—quoted in Martyr!—wrote.

Who really wants to remember that?

Clearly, Kaveh Akbar does because he comes smack up against death in the story of Cyrus and Orkideh so honestly that it made my head spin—and I’m a person who remembers death all the time. Their conversations over the next few days bring Cyrus to the moment when he sees for the first time what he’s let life make him and how different this is from who he wants to be.

I cared about him; I felt changed, too.

Martyr! is a remarkable book. A first novel. A novel by a gifted poet whose language is as beautiful as poetry but who doesn’t forget he’s writing fiction, as poets writing fiction too often do. It’s smart without being show-offish. It’s heartbreaking. It’s at times hilarious.

And Kaveh Akbar is an Indiana writer. How cool is that!

NYT Feature: What Drives Kaveh Akhbar?