Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Overall Rating: 2 Stars

Man. When I got this novel, I really thought it was going to be a slam dunk. I thought this was going to be a no-brainer five star read for me, based on the rating, reviews, all the awards, etc.

Even the prologue! Cyrus Shams, high, drunk, laying in his apartment asking God for a sign that he’s real, and his lamp flickers. And he’s like “holy shit, just do that one more time to confirm”, and then nothing happens. At that moment, I was thinking to myself that this was going to be something special. But, as the novel continued, there was just so much about this book that I didn’t enjoy.

This was not a book for me. It was a book for someone, but that person isn’t me. Let’s get into it.

SPOILERS BELOW.

I’ll start with the good.

This was a book written by a poet. You can tell, for sure, as the language is beautiful. The prose itself is really captivating and the way that Kaveh Akbar strings sentences together is nothing short of spectacular.

That, unfortunately, is pretty much all I have for good.

You can tell this book was a debut novel by someone who wrote mostly poetry due to the absolute lack of anything resembling a plot or character. All the characters, maybe outside of Cyrus, have little to nothing to them. Cyrus’ sponsor is a great character… in ONE CHAPTER. and then he’s gone and you never see him again. Zee, Cyrus best friend/love, I know nothing about outside of his love of Cyrus and cigarettes. He narrates just a single chapter (no idea why), in which Cyrus accidentally hits his foot with an axe and bleeds everywhere. No idea what that was about. I didn’t love the random point-of-view swapping in this book, either. I would have preferred if Cyrus narrated the whole thing, or at least most of it, but I don’t think there was enough story there to make it any more than a novella without the additional point of view chapters.

The plot, in and of itself, is compelling. A depressed Cyrus wants his death to mean something, after his mother dies when her plane is shot down (more on that later) and his father passes years later. He wants to write a book about martyrs to articulate this feeling. He learns about an art show where an Iranian woman dying of cancer is staying at a museum to talk about death with the general population. To make her death mean something, as he views it, so he decides to go visit her.

That’s the plot.

But, chapter to chapter, nothing really happens in this book. There are long stretches where nothing happens except Cyrus feeling sorry for himself or him dreaming about Kareem Abdul Jabbar having a conversation with his father. There are so many times where I found myself wanting to skip ahead in hopes of finding something that grabs my attention and keeps me wanting to read more, but that just so rarely happened. It felt like each chapter was a poem, so to speak. Beautiful, flowery language. Deep meaning, but really nothing happening in regards to plot or character.

There’s a massive twist in this book. (AGAIN SPOILER WARNING IF YOU’RE STILL READING). Cyrus’ mother actually didn’t die in the plane crash, and she’s the artist he goes to New York to see! Like “What a twist!” he said sarcastically.

I had so many problems with this. His mother had an affair with a woman, swapped passports with her, and actually survived. Her lover was the one that died in the plane crash. But despite this, she makes no effort to contact her husband, her son, etc. She just carries on with her life under a new identity? She moves to America and becomes an artist? She never once wonders how or what her husband or child are doing? What kind of mother does that?

Even when Cyrus comes and sees her at the art show, and they talk about martyrs and whatnot, she talks to him like he’s a stranger! She never says “Oh my god, Cyrus! My boy!” It’s only AFTER she dies that her partner contacts Cyrus and says: “Oh yeah, that was your mom.”

What? Are we being serious?

We even get flashbacks, from his mother’s perspective, and she hardly talks about abandoning her son. She predominantly feels sadness that her lover died in the plane, but hardly says a word about the fact that her baby boy is carrying on living his life thinking she’s dead. It’s bizarre to say the least.

I would imagine that, for a different reader, this book could land hard. Cyrus had a lot of characteristics that I think other readers may find interesting, but for me, it just didn’t do it. Not every book, even the award winning ones with 4 and a half star averages on Goodreads, is for everyone. Martyr! was not for me.