First off, Kaveh Akbar is a very fine wordsmith. He's a poet, and it shows. Some of the phrases and sentences are literally arresting - they make you stop and re-read and savor.

The story is potentially difficult: our hero is a self-absorbed recovering addict who mostly lives in his own head and is clever enough to draw sympathy and compassion as he skates through a life focused on composing a death worth the dying (hence the title). Fortunately the writing, as mentioned, is strong enough to carry you along, and there is a sort of absurdist humor that undercuts the sordid details of the story. The narrative is intercut with fantastic, and often hilarious, dream dialogues between extremely unlikely duos (e.g., Kareem Abdul Jabbar and our hero's imaginary little brother).

I'm not sure what to make of the ending. The story veers off into a sort of fairytale of coincidences and revelations before a magically realistic ending. I think it's a happy ending and not our hero's achievement of martyrdom, but I'm not completely sure.

In any event, the book is worth reading, and I expect much more from the author.

THE RUMPUS
Issue 42, Member Newsletter

The Mini-Interview Project: Kaveh Akbar
by Jenny Bartoy

Cyrus Shams wants his death to matter. Newly sober and nearing thirty, he grapples for meaning in his recovery, his friendships, and his pursuit of art. As he ponders his end, Cyrus also examines the life of his recently deceased Iranian father, spent toiling in an industrial chicken farm in the Midwest, and the senseless death of his mother in a plane blown to dust by an American missile decades before. Cyrus’s obsession with martyrdom leads him to a terminally ill artist performing her death in a Brooklyn museum and to surprising answers.

At once entertaining and existential, self-aware and earnest, Martyr! (Knopf, 2024) explores the big question: what yields a meaningful life? Kaveh Akbar has written a sharp, lyrical, and often hilarious novel, a finespun story that provokes both thought and emotion.

Akbar is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Rumpus and other publications. He’s also authored two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf.

I enjoyed a lively chat with the author over Zoom and we discussed Martyr!’s origin story, the indelible imprint of the self in fiction, the inadequacies of language, and more.

***

The Rumpus: Let’s start with basics. Where did this story originate?

Kaveh Akbar: I've always had this idea of doing a Marina Abramović-esque performance of my own dying. As a person in recovery, who ten years ago had a pre-cirrhotic liver, the membrane between me and an early preventable death was much thinner than it is today. I thought about this idea a lot, and a cool thing that you can do in fiction is carry out a thought experiment over the course of 85,000 words instead of having to actually live it.

The very earliest drafts of Martyr! were a Tuesdays with Morrie-esque book where the interlocutor with the artist was sort of a cipher, a foil for the artist to bounce her ideas off of. It didn't take me long to realize that that wasn't narratively interesting. In thinking about how to turn it from a treatise into a novel, the shape of the narrative began to emerge.

Rumpus: This book has been described as an autobiographical novel. Do you agree with that categorization?

Akbar: In the US, Martyr! is being presented as autofiction-adjacent. There is a my-age-ish protagonist, who is an Iranian American poet in recovery from addiction, and so there are these obvious superficial biographical overlaps. But in the UK, they have a female image on the cover, and the copy centers the artist. I have nothing to do with those publicity decisions, but it seems like it’s being sold there as if the artist is the protagonist. The second half of the book is more heavily about her while the first half of the book is more Cyrus-heavy. But, yeah, lots of stories in the book are literally things that happened to me. And I also think it's very much a fictional novel about the artist.

The poet Li-Young Lee says, “Syntax is identity,” which is to say, the way that I speak, the way that I think, is inflected indelibly by every conversation that I've ever had, all of my geographies and genealogies, every book in the order that I read them and every movie in the order that I've seen them, et cetera . . . I could write a very actuarial description of a tree or a fork that would indelibly be inflected by my autobiographical experience. I don't think of myself as being a particularly imaginative person. I think of myself as someone who pays attention. Everything enters through the prism of its utility to my writing one way or another.

Rumpus: You're an acclaimed poet. What was your process in approaching this new genre? What challenged or surprised you in writing fiction?

Akbar: I started writing this really innocuously. My friend Tommy Orange and I trade pages every Friday and mine got a little prosier. We ended up writing these novels: he wrote Wandering Stars, the sequel to There There, and I wrote this book. So, I sort of tiptoed backwards into it, and when I realized what I was doing, I didn't want to assume that I could write a novel because I had spent years writing poems, so I put myself on this narrative diet of watching a movie a day and reading two novels a week, just foies-gras-ducking narrative into myself. And that was amazing. I would watch Summer with Monika one day and then Pineapple Express the next day.

I wanted to train my instincts in narrative movement. I know how to make wise people say wise shit to each other, but what I struggled with was explaining how people paid their rent, how characters got to the coffee shop in order to volley those quippy bon mots to each other, what they did with their hands and what was on the walls in the room. I had spent my life calibrating my instincts towards a kind of elliptical associative lyric. Moving those instincts toward narrative was thrilling, in the way that it's thrilling to go to a country where you don't speak the language. I rewrote some scenes dozens of times, finding my voice changing, improving with each draft.

Rumpus: Martyr! is the perfect existential novel for the millennial-Gen Z crowd. It almost feels like a manifesto. I think Cyrus’s despair will feel relatable to many in our borderline-dystopian era. Capitalism, imperialism, racism—to what extent is his search for a death and ultimately a life that matter related to these -isms? Was the political subtext intentional or organic as you wrote?

Akbar: I don't have one lobe of my brain for looking at images of a rubbled Gaza and children crying over their parents’ corpses and another lobe of my brain for being in love with my spouse. I don't have one lobe of my brain for being with my students daily and another for considering how they’re teetering on the precipice of irreversible ecological collapse. It's all in there. I'm never only feeling one thing.

The idiom of social media discourse has pushed toward a kind of moral obviousness, this idea that people can only be thinking one rhetorically and ethically hygienic thing at a time, right? So I can't think about how I need to go walk my dog because I'm also thinking about the plight of girls’ schools in Iran right now, or vice versa. There should always be this one monolithic eclipsing thought at any moment. But the realities are that I'm a human being and I'm yoked to my subjectivity, and if I don't walk my dog, he's gonna be sad, he’s gonna shit on my carpet. The brain is a big place. I can feel the pathologization of cognitive dissonance in the twentieth century contaminating our twenty-first century discourse.

I wanted, maybe more than any other single aesthetic ambition, for Martyr! to feel ugly in that way, to feel morally unhygienic. Messy and complicit the way being alive feels messy and complicit. There is a kind of shitty cynicism today that passes for wisdom, and I’m deeply skeptical of that. And there’s a kind of insistence on hope that can be used as a cudgel to suppress real critiques of the status quo. I’m deeply skeptical of that too. There's not a lot of space in the social media discourse to say, “I’m complicit and so are you, what do we do?” but there are writers who have made good work around that idea. Writers living and dead. It feels like a profound privilege to get to be a little whisper into that conversation that has preceded me by centuries and will continue long after the last person forgets my name.

Rumpus: A theme that recurs in this book Martyr! is language—its inadequacies, its tyranny, its frustrating duality when one is bilingual, its limitations, particularly as it relates to recovery. Language is almost a foe in this book. Would you agree?

Akbar: I am obsessed with language, obviously, as a painter is obsessed with her paints or as a sculptor might be obsessed with clay. Language is the medium of my art. What I'm interested in, in almost all art, is when the emotional catalytic just dwarfs the representational capacity of the medium, right? Whether it's time marbling itself into Sappho or Coltrane's high C, just the insufficiency of language to talk about really anything that we want to talk about—God, loneliness, love, you know.

Allen Grossman said, “A poem is about a thing the way a cat is about a house.” That pretty well applies to all interesting art. The thing I make on the page is never going to be the love that I feel for my spouse, no matter how much I work on endlessly reprocessing this love poem that I write for them. There has to be some acknowledgement of that delta, between what the art can do and what it's actually pointing towards, like Rodin's thumb prints all over his sculptures. There has to be some acknowledgement of the insufficiency of the medium.


___________________________

Jenny Bartoy is a French-American writer and editor based in the Pacific Northwest. She is the editor of Broken Free: Writers on Estrangement, a collection in development. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, Chicago Review of Books, CrimeReads, Room, Hippocampus Magazine, and the anthology Sharp Notions: Essays from the Stitching Life (2023), among other publications. She is the former managing editor of Literary Mama and Quiltfolk magazine. She holds a master's degree in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University.

MARTYR by Kaveh Akbar was a delightful read. Challenging me to pay attention, the twists and turns of a young man convinced he has witnessed a miracle were so well-written, so incredibly grounded and poetic, it felt more like a real-life experience than reading a book. Akbar absolutely had me enthralled every moment -- his poetic language, adroit plot jolts, everything I never knew I wanted from a story until I had it with this one. Relationships ring so true, especially the musings of a lost and earnest and good man trying to make sense of the world, his life, and the people he encounters. An amazing book that will remain with me forever. I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

This is a book of ideas. A lot of ideas that don’t all come together into a cohesive whole. It’s beautifully written and at times very interesting, on an intellectual level, but there are a couple of things that I just couldn’t get past. The fact that this character is obsessed with giving his death, rather than his life, meaning speaks to an untreated depression and anxiety disorder that is briefly mentioned then pointedly ignored in the story. Why is it ignored? It seems to me because if it’s addressed then the entire premise of this book falls apart like a house of cards. Because if Cyrus’ quest for martyrdom is a matter of mental health (or lack thereof) rather than some sort of grand ideology then his journey isn’t a legitimate life choice but a sad decline. I understand that this entire story is meant as allegory. He creates a meaning for his mother’s life. Gives her the power to choose her end. But it’s hard to ignore that again, Orkideh herself seems to have had lifelong depression and even in her dream version she chooses to end her life alone, separate from those who love her, and without revealing her true identity to her son. So what is the concept of martyrdom that this story embraces: I’m honestly not even sure. Is Cyrus filled with love in the end or the glory of death? And which of those is heroic or does he consider them one and the same? As a side note, this is a really interesting moment in time to publish a novel ruminating and often glorifying martyrdom and to treat that idea and it’s impact on our world today so lightly. The running “joke” of “Iranian men obsessed with martyrdom” is not funny in the least given the very real Iranian funded martyr brigades that slaughtered hundreds on October 7.

Martyr! Unapologetic Literary Fiction!

The fact that this book is written by a man born in Iran, the title had me worried, especially with that exclamation point. To say it pushed me off kilter wouldn’t be an understatement. It covers so much: art, perspective, stories and poems, religion, philosophy, politics and yes, even sexuality. I predict it will be the topic of many conversations which would otherwise avoid subjects of substance.

Cyrus Shams, a young man whose mother is on that fated passenger airliner shot down by the US Navy in 1988. His father, a laborer, moves them to the US and they end up in Indiana, where Cyrus attends a small liberal arts college. Cyrus might be brilliant, but lives in an ennui that keeps him from caring about performance, often doing only enough to keep from failing. He seems always to be in an altered state, from alcohol, any kind of drug and does not sleep. And he is considered pre-suicidal and obsessed with all martyrdom-- not just religious or patriotic, but “Earth Martyrs”, and he wants his death to mean something. Beyond all that, the book is full of biting satire and delightful humor.

The book is Cyrus’s search for that meaning. One of the things I love about the book is the occasional shift in viewpoint character, whether it is his mother, father, best friend, or other characters. It gives the reader perspective beyond Cyrus, whose narration is less than reliable. Akbar weaves mythology, classic poetry, music, and art into a collage that leads Cyrus to question and find answers to the big questions: what is love, death, reality. So much is told in dreams, whether natural or drug induced, that by the time I got to the end, I, too, questioned Cyrus’s reality.

The language of the novel thrives with Akbar’s poetic voice. The book is not unlike a full-length poem, though, like the best poetry, it is accessible to any reader. We like Cyrus, even when we know he is on a path of self-destruction. We want him to succeed, but we want him to live.

This is an author to watch—he is a citizen of the universe, and he’s not afraid to show the rest of us. Martyr! will be released on January 23, 2024 by Knopf. Thanks To Knopf and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this wonderful novel.

Unfortunately, this book just wasn't my cup of tea. Maybe it was all the hype that I would find myself weeping over this book but that was not the case for me. The book felt so disjointed and unconnected in so many ways. It's possible because the author is a poet and the book was written more to the style of poetry than a customary novel. I had no emotional connection to any of the characters and especially not the main character of Cyrus. I read another review that called him a "sad sack" and he is indeed a VERY sad sack.
I did find the "art installation" by Orkideh interesting in concept and my mind would drift off thinking about it.

This novel was quite unusual and if you enjoy books about sad people and poetry then you could be the target audience. The coincidences, dreams, and all the extraneous character narratives just left me confused and longing for an ending that connected the dots.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Publishing for the advanced copy of the book in exchange for my honest opinion and feedback.

What a whirl wind of a novel.

What I loved most about this read is the story line, it reads very smooth, and the description of characters makes them come to life.

Cyrus Shams is an addict who struggles internally with the loss of his mother and father. He traveled from Indiana to Brooklyn where he is in search of Orkideh whom like himself is an Iranian immigrant, as an artist Orkideh is dying of cancer, and this is where we have to wonder if his encounter with her will bring closure to his internal struggles.

Very enjoyable read for me. I did find it took a bit longer than normal to finish but in all it was a good read I would recommend to those that want to be taken away on a journey to the internal struggles with a young man trying to find out what makes one a Martyr.

Thank you NetGalley for the advanced digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Part way through reading Marytr! I was reminded of shapeshifting gods from Greek mythology, especially Proteus and Periclymenus, who could change forms as suited them: for romance, war, intelligence gathering, or escape. The narrative structure and narrator of Kaveh Akbar’s Marytr! is much like this, prone to sudden loopy and abrupt changes in POV, form, and direction, which bewilderingly mostly keep the story on track. To delineate the plot and themes would almost take a novel; this is a philosophic exploration of death, addition, politics, status, family, migration, sexual identity, cultural mythology, and self-absorption.

It’s the story of a haunted and recovering millennial Iranian man, Cyrus Sham, an orphan who is obsessed by martyrdom, beginning with his mother’s death as a passenger on the infamous passenger flight 655 in Iran, which was mistakenly shot down by US forces, perceiving it to be a hostile aircraft. Ali, Cyrus’s father, retreats in his grief to raise his young son in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and logs in decades of backbreaking work at a chicken farm. He dies from a stroke almost as soon as Cyrus is in college. And perhaps as a response, Cyrus gets tangled in years-long addiction, his friend and more than friend, Zee, a witness and companion to his recovery, which is perhaps substituted for another addiction, a quest for a death that is meaningful, which translates into his version of martyrdom. Cyrus thinks he might find an answer in the latest performance art piece by Orkideh, an Iranian artist, whose final work, Death-Speak, is fueled by her terminal cancer diagnosis; she holds attendance at the Brooklyn museum, and has one on one interactions with museum goers as her final days play out. But the path is not straightforward; it jogs between excerpts of Cyrus’s half-written martyr book, his speculative musings, samples of poems, and voices and viewpoints of his dead mother and the devastating memories of her brother, his uncle, a man broken from seeing too many dead in the Iran/Iraq war. And there are many surprises that await Cyrus, some that stretch credulity to the breaking point, and others that seem more self-indulgent than plot or character focused. Still, there is something in the author’s voice that is so unique, so original and searing, so lyrical and unsparing and sure, that the narrative leaches into you, unsettling and indelible. My thanks to NetGalley and Knopf.

This book was unlike anything I have ever read. It was beautiful and sad. Hopeful and heartbreaking.

Martyr! is the story of Cyrus - an aspiring writer and poet who is battling addiction and his past. He is recently sober and trying to reconcile the death of his parents with his purpose in life. His mother was killed when her plane was accidentally shot down by the US government, and his father died suddenly after raising him on his own,

Cyrus becomes obsessed with the idea of martyrdom. He decides it should be the focus of his next project, and is seeking out both people he knows and others he doesn't for their stories.

I don't want to give too much away, because this book is so uniquely written - from the perspectives of several characters and also through poems, and dream sequences. It went places I didn't expect but enjoyed. It was quirky and also deeply moving. It was incredibly well-written, and a story that will stay with me for a while.

Big thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for the Advanced copy. Martyr! is out on Tuesday!!

Will post on goodreads, retail sites and my bookstagram @scottonreads

The writing here was simply beautiful. I was so drawn in by the story, and my focus was kept by the writing style. As I got more and more into the narrative, and as I was able to learn more about Cyrus and Roya, I couldn't tear myself away. I will recommend this book to anyone who asks!

Cyrus Shams is drifting in his college town in Indiana. His mother died when he was a baby; her commercial plane was shot down by an American warship. Cyrus and his father, Ali, immigrate from Iran to Fort Wayne, where Ali breaks himself working on a chicken farm. Cyrus writes poetry, but mostly he struggles with substance abuse and wonders whether it’s worth being alive. He becomes obsessed with the idea of martyrdom, starts writing a book about it. When he hears of an artist, Orkideh, whose final exhibition consists of her talking to visitors as she dies of cancer in a museum, Cyrus travels to New York to speak with her.

The novel is told unconventionally. It moves back and forth through time, covering Cyrus’s childhood and his mother’s life. It zips through dream sequences featuring characters like Lisa Simpson. Poems from Cyrus’s book appear between chapters. Akbar’s prose is lyrical, both wry and earnest. Leaning into horrors is a way to explore big questions about violence, duty, art, faith, love. Akbar searches unironically for the meaning of life.

I’ve read and liked Kaveh Akbar’s poetry, but I was unprepared for what this novel would do to me—and yet, perfectly primed by living my life. So many times and in so many ways, it stabbed right at my soul. The university town is a fictional version of my hometown, and Akbar’s details were uncomfortably close. More broadly, he captures the particular Midwestern sadness that came with looking a certain way in Indiana in the 2000s.

About four-fifths of the way through, I read one of the most perfect chapters of a novel I have ever read, and the novel ascended onto a higher plane. I don’t want to spoil anything. But I will say, the soul of this book is vast and generous. Ultimately, life always has meaning. We are never really alone. I left this book feeling so completely grateful to be alive. It is a book for defiant aliveness.

I know that this one has been on many highly anticipated lists, but I'm not quite sure that I'm on the same page as those lists. "Martyr!" by Kaveh Akbar left me perplexed. The narrative follows Cyrus Shams, a young man entangled in a legacy of violence and loss. His mother's plane crash and his father's life working in a chicken factory seem disconnected. Cyrus, a drunk, addict, and poet, fixates on martyrs, leading to a confusing exploration of his past. The mention of an uncle dressed as the angel of death and a mysterious painting adds layers of complexity without clear connections. Akbar's prose, while poetic, leaves readers grappling with disjointed elements, making "Martyr!" an enigmatic journey that raises more questions than it answers.

Thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, Knopf for the advanced reader copy to review via NetGalley.

Martyr!
By Kaveh Akbar

This is the story of a young man, Cyrus Shams, Iranian by birth, but raised from an early age in the American Midwest. Cyrus is a would-be poet and writer. He is also addicted to multitudinous drugs and alcohol. He is 29 years old and just sort of drifting through life.

His back story is: his mother was killed when the plane she was in was accidentally shot down by an American battleship; his father died suddenly while he Cyrus was away at college; and his only other relative, Uncle Arash, lives in Iran, a survivor of the Iran-Iraq war with severe PTSD. He is effectively alone in the world.

Cyrus is obsessed with dying a meaningful death. When he finds out that a celebrated artist who is dying of cancer has decided to make what remains of her life meaningful by living in a museum where she speaks with anyone who wants to hear what she has to say, he decides to go speak to her.

After this meeting he chooses to write a book about martyrs who have died for a good reason – and decides to end the book with his own death. From this point on the story just gets more bizarre.

I found the book to be quirky and in some ways hard to follow. It is definitely different! If you don't mind working for it, the story can be worth the journey.

Great writing, but the story and style ending up not being for me. Thanks for the ARC! Our library did choose to purchase a copy. Being located in an Iowa public library, we try to support our Iowa based authors!

The story of an Iranian immigrant who is a poet and recovering addict that becomes fixated on the idea of martyrs and assigning value to his life and death. Absolutely stunning prose that blew my mind but the storytelling was too disjointed to fully grasp me. I’d still recommend this for the writing alone.

This beautifully written debut is the story of an Iranian-American who is dealing with loss and trauma. As a young child, he lost his mom when her plane was shot down by US military over Tehran and his dad recently passed away from a stroke after a life working on a chicken farm in Indiana. The story is told in the first person by this young man, who is a recovering addict/alcoholic. He has a goal of writing a book about martyrs to make sense of his past while exploring the possibility of becoming a martyr himself. It's not as depressing as it sounds--there is a lot of humor sprinkled in here as he explores his goal-- and the writing is something to be savored. And how about that ending?! I fully expect this one to be at the top of many best of 2024!

The main character, Cyrus, was fixated with finding meaning in life or in death. His Iranian mother was shot down in a passenger plane by the US. His father moved them to the US where he toiled 6 days a week in a chicken factory to pay for Cyrus’ education. Cyrus was newly sober and wanted to make sure his life or death was significant. He obsessed over martyrdom. The first half of the book moved very slowly for me but picked up when he went to NYC. The book reminded me a lot of the storyline of Pippin. In the end, love wins out.

I have to say the first half of this book was a slog for me. Plot wise nothing much happens until you are almost finished. Cyrus is a lost soul, obsessed with his own death- except first he wants to figure out how to die a martyr. I kinda wanted to just slap him. But as the book develops and we get more information the seemingly disjointed parts do come together. Cyrus does grow as a person. If you can stick with it you will be rewarded.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Omg. I am obsessed and thankful to Knopf Books, Kaveh Akbar, PRH Audio, and Netgalley for granting me advanced digital, physical, and audio access to this bittersweet novel about generational trauma, growth, and family. Martyr! hits shelves on January 23, 2024, and I can't wait for the hype to come.

Cyrus Shams is fresh to the sober scene and finds he's struggling to find his place in the world, he decides to embrace his writing journey and his familial history from its origins in Tehran and beyond until he stumbles upon an art exhibit of a dying Iranian woman in Brooklyn and decides to journey out east to interview this brave woman for his prose.

Throughout this journey, he learns a great amount about where he comes from, and even a bit about this mysterious woman and her origins as well. The subject of Cyrus's book is Martyrs and their existence throughout history and familial units, assuming that this woman makes the perfect subject for his novel, but what he comes to find out, will spoil and alter his intentions for worse and for the best.

Martyr! is about GROWTH and acceptance and forgiveness and I wish I could read this book all over again to get a taste of that bittersweet fruit.

I loved this more than I anticipated, and it is a must-read in my opinion! The prose was beautiful, and lyrical at times- no surprise there. Akbar takes the reader on Cyrus' journey of self-discovery using razor-sharp insight and humor. His family saga encapsulates all the turmoil of his generation. Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for this ARC!