I thought Martyr was going to be a no-brainer, a novel that I wouldn’t even have to think about because it was pretty much guaranteed that I’d love it. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

My fundamental issue with Martyr is that it feels like a collection of parts rather than a cohesive whole. Its parts feel disjointed, out of step with each other, not quite amounting to a narrative that feels effective as well as impactful. To me, the novel was missing those interstitial parts that make a sequence of chapters feel like a story rather than just…a sequence of chapters. We get chapters from Cyrus’s POV, chapters from his father’s POV, chapters from his mother’s POV, chapters where characters and historical figures talk to Cyrus, and I think, put together, those POVs didn’t particularly work. It’s not that I’m opposed to these kinds of POVs, or to multiple POVs, but more that I didn’t think the novel gave them enough time and space to feel fleshed out. The result being that they felt like pit stops in the narrative, sections we needed to inclue to get to where we needed to get to in the end.

Structure aside, I did appreciate this novel’s attempts to explore certain themes; it reminded me a little of The Idiot + Either/Or by Elif Batuman in its thematic focus (stylistically, though, they’re very different). Both are very much rigorously existential novels: where Batuman’s novels question the templates by which we’re expected to live (heteronormative relationships, compulsory heterosexuality, the either/or of living an aesthetic vs. ethical life), Martyr is interested in the question of how to give life meaning through death–its central focus being, of course, martyrdom. I said I appreciate Martyr‘s attempts to explore this topic, but that’s exactly it: it attempts, but it doesn’t quite succeed (for me at least). I could tell what the novel was trying to do, and I could also tell that its attempts were not bad, but ultimately those attempts missed the mark for me.

Martyr is a novel that has so much potential, and yet never quite comes together. I started it expecting to love it–it seemed, by all accounts, like just the kind of novel I’d love–and finished it confused because all those things I’d expected to love were present in the writing but not effectively written. The writing is fine but not strong enough to sustain such an internal story (I was expecting a lot from the writing given that the author is a poet but it didn’t really wow me), and the story itself felt somewhat scattered and underdeveloped. Altogether, I was left pretty disappointed by this one.

I have loved Kaveh Akbar's poetry for years and was beyond excited to read this book. It measures up in every way to Akbar's previous books but is also something entirely its own. I have never read a book like Martyr! One could say this is a book about immigration or religion or addiction or love or loss but it is really none of those things (although all of them are present and beautifully rendered.) What I loved most about the book was the particular type of magic Akbar weaves into the story and the language. I have heard the author talk many times about his belief in bewilderment as the driving force behind good art and it is that energy that I think lies at the heart of this story.

Akbar's prose is deceptively simple and although I admit I wouldn't have minded if the language was a bit more like his poetry, at the end of the day I think it aligns with how this story wants to be told. In terms of both language and plot, there were moments that felt a bit surface level to me, but by the end of the book I was left with a sense of openness and a reverence for life which I have yet to find in any other book. I will also say that I saw the plot twist coming from a mile away, but who really cares about things like that nowadays,

what a revelation of a book.

I've been trying to find words to describe the experience of reading this for over a day, and all I can come up with is that it's nothing like any book I've read before. it's funny, beautifully written (the poetics!!) and so unapologetically honest in its depiction of humanity. it made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me question so much of what I know of history, beauty, loss, and my place within them. I'm definitely going to come back to this one time and time again.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the review copy!


Martyr! is as good a case as any for making the distinction between great writers and great thinkers. Kaveh Akbar is obviously both, but the evidence of the latter lies in his deployment of the former: never for nothing, always in the service of potent ideas. I highlighted loads of beautiful lines throughout the book—Akbar is a poet, after all—but more often, I highlighted passages not because of how eloquently or evocatively they were expressed but because of the deep wells of insight they contained, the kind of hard-won insight I suspect you can only find after dragging yourself across the personal battlefield of addiction.


In spite of (or perhaps because of) how hyper-specific this story is—a possibly suicidal, orphaned, addicted poet travels to Brooklyn to interview a dying artist for his forthcoming book on martyrs—I have a hard time imagining Akbar’s whole life isn’t there on the page. What else but experience could let you write so knowingly, so scathingly, and yet so forgivingly about the outer extremes of inner pain? To write so boldly and baldly about the darkest possible impulses transcends the longing for martyrdom that Akbar’s in-book avatar (Cyrus) feels, instead approaching the kind of life-affirming purpose he fears (or worse, hopes) he can only find in death.

Those themes are rich enough to be interesting in any format, but how lucky we are that Akbar has the superpower of being able to write both poetry and prose—a hack that makes his book feel fuller, more alive for containing them both. This may be a trite observation coming from a non-poet, but it’s hard not to read Akbar’s cascading, blossoming language and his ability to simultaneously exist so far inside and yet so clearly outside his own head as proof of a magical, poetic lens through which he must see the world. With seeming effortlessness, he makes us see, too.


After 300 or so pages in which I was more or less enthralled, I did stumble a bit on the slightly abstracted ending—though to be fair, I’m not sure what I wanted. In some ways, the collagist story Akbar builds (Cyrus’ life, his parents’ lives, his uncle’s life, the real and imagined lives of various historical martyrs, Lisa Simpson’s life, et al) has the additive effect of feeling like it must contain all of life, effectively, and thus any ending at all might’ve felt abrupt or perfunctory, the way most life-endings do. Either way, there’s more than enough to chew on, which doubles as a one-sentence encapsulation of the whole book: a fresh, funny novel, supercharged with the vitality that comes from staring unblinkingly at death, then continuing to draw breath anyways.

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. As a young boy, Cyrus Shams and his father immigrate to the US from Iran after his mother’s plane is mistakenly shot out of the sky by the US Air Force. Now Cyrus’s father has passed away and Cyrus is battling addiction demons and wants to be a poet, with his first book being a collection of poems about martyrs. And it may be his only book, as the idea of becoming a martyr is becoming more and more appealing. At least he knows he wants his life to count. This is a wonderful first novel that’s told through several family members, but always comes back to Cyrus, who leaves his safe life in Indiana to visit an Iranian artist who is dying and her last exhibition is to talk about life and death with anyone who visits her at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. An exhibition that will change Cyrus’s life in unimaginable ways.

There's no way that I could describe the experience of reading this book that would do it justice. But I'll try anyway:

I didn't want to cry, so I held back, but holding back just gave me a headache, and I ended up crying anyway.

This is ultimately a book about many people's stories converging into one coherent mess of a life, because sometimes life doesn't make sense; and sometimes it's ugly in a way that not even poets can romanticize.

This book is one that I think would be hard to pull off if it was written by any other author, so I am grateful that it was this author in particular who decided to write it and allowed us to read it.

I can feel already that this one is going to sit with me for a long, long time.

This was an interesting read that I found my self enjoying more as I read it. I found myself wondering where it was all going many times at the beginning. This focuses on a youngish orphaned son of Iranian immigrants coming to terms with his history and seeking meaning in his (and others) life. I was initially worried that this was going to be a bit too philosophical for me but the story really picked up and I was totally into it by the end. Dare I say, I even found it uplifting. I do feel more editing would have made it a better, more focused novel--especially in the first 100 or so pages. But, that is a minor quibble. Overall, this is a book that I will recommend to anyone who likes literary fiction and does not mind slower, more thoughtful pacing in their fiction.