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Martyr!: A novel Kindle Edition
“Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.” —Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of There There
“The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.” —Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and Furies
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateJanuary 23, 2024
- File size6336 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Brilliant . . . steeped in humor and absurdity but deathly serious as well . . . The strength of Martyr! is that Akbar arranges its various messes well and doesn’t strive too hard to reconcile them.” —Los Angeles Times
“Martyr! is almost violently artful, full of sentences that stab, pierce, and slice with their beauty . . . Reading this prose can feel like watching an Olympic athlete perform household tasks: Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself. It’s tonally nuanced—in command of a dazzling spectrum of frequencies from comedic to tragic—rigorous, and surprising.” —The New Yorker
“Wry, blasphemous, grim, grimy and moving . . . Martyr! is so much its own creation that comparisons don't help. Maybe you could think of it as something of an Iranian American spin on John Kennedy Toole's comic picaresque A Confederacy Of Dunces, wedded to Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, another meditation on a missing mother and the unpredictable power of art.” —NPR
“Reading Martyr! is a delight. Sensual, oneiric and wonderfully strange, Akbar intuits the mind’s talent for distilling meaning from the surreal. His fiction taps his expertise in conjuring an experiential purity—through metaphor and with humor that lands.” —The Washington Post
“An existential comedy about the difficulty of finding beauty in banality and sense in suffering . . . In writing this novel about a would-be martyr lost amid the banal clichés and tired stories Americans tell themselves in order to live, Akbar has shown that the only way to make meaning out of meaninglessness is to become the author of our own story.” —The Atlantic
“Akbar's debut is full of love, fury, humor and wisdom. Protagonist Cyrus Shams-poet, recovering alcoholic, son of one of the passengers- is coming straight for your heart.” —People
“A deep-feeling, beautifully bruised debut novel . . . [Martyr!] reads like the book that Akbar has been building up to most of his life.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“A dazzling, thrilling debut novel about identity and loss . . . Martyr! thrillingly depicts why we cobble selves from alloys of words and cultures.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A brilliant and blisteringly alive novel about not just how we go on, but also why. Kaveh Akbar's first novel is so stunning, so wrenching, and so beautifully written that reading it for the first time, I kept forgetting to breathe. I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life." —John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars
"I can’t remember the last time a book made me feel like this. Martyr! is simply extraordinary. The language moves across the page like a symphony, and the story vibrates with an energy that made the book impossible to put down. Kaveh Akbar has written a novel that will stay with me forever. What a story. What a voice. What a gift.” —Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed
“Kaveh Akbar renders the full spectrum of life, and death, with great beauty and care.” —Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful. MARTYR! is the best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness for people longed for but forever unknown, the way art as eruption of life gazes back into death, and the ecstasy that sometimes arrives—like grace—when we find ourselves teetering on the knife-edge of despair.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven’t loved a book this much in years. Kaveh’s writing is so thoroughly powerful and gorgeous you can feel it from where dreams come, and in all over your brain, and straight from the bottom of your heart. This book does everything. It is so entirely funny and sad and true and beautiful. Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.”
—Tommy Orange, author of There There
“Kaveh Akbar has given birth to a hilarious marvel of a novel. Rip-roaringly funny. Wise and wise-assed. It’s about addiction and love, self-pity and rage and moving instants of profound redemption. Akbar stands among our greatest poets, but calling this novel lyrical isn’t code for lack of plot. Akbar is a black-belt storyteller, and Martyr! is a page-turner I couldn’t put down." —Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club
“I disappeared into Martyr!—utterly consumed by it—and then it returned me to the world with wider eyes, a swollen heart, and sharpened nerve endings. This is a book that understands the strangeness and grief and ecstasy of being alive; that understands the strange envelope of a body, the proximate sublime on the bare chest of a beloved; the baffled wonderment of sobriety, the grief that spans every scale of the human project—and, more than anything, the impossible salvation of love persisting not despite but through these materials. Kaveh Akbar writes with the staggering entirety of his mind and heart, and Martyr! will stay in my soul for good—a fever dream, a reckoning, a heartbreak, a shattering and mending, a delight—its double-helix of dreams and conversation now part of my own DNA for good." —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
“Poet Akbar (Pilgrim Bell, 2021) is an almost deliriously adept first-time novelist, writing from different points of view and darting back and forth in time and into Cyrus’ satirical dreams and the lives of Iranian poets from Rumi to Farrokhzad. Akbar creates scenes of psychedelic opulence and mystery, emotional precision, edgy hilarity, and heart-ringing poignancy as his characters endure war, grief, addiction, and sacrifice, and find refuge in art and love. Bedazzling and profound." —Booklist (starred review)
“Sublime . . . [Akbar’s] writing makes just enough time for beauty while never languishing . . . although a novel cannot capture what life is, its truths and inventions can powerfully gesture toward what life is like: full of both pain and pleasure, with death inevitable, and love a choice.” —Bookpage (starred review)
“Martyr! stands out as a work of uncommon artistic assuredness and vibrancy . . . As carried through by [Akbar’s] poetic pen and perspective, the novel is rich in humor, sharp observation, and a plea for self-love, and all bleakness balanced by a tenderness that generously insinuates itself like sun through shut blinds.” —Library Journal (starred review)
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B0C3C886FY
- Publisher : Knopf (January 23, 2024)
- Publication date : January 23, 2024
- Language : English
- File size : 6336 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 313 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,497 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2 in LGBTQ+ Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #7 in Humorous Literary Fiction
- #18 in LGBTQ+ Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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Kaveh Akbar is the author of the novel Martyr! and two books of poetry, Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine and, with Paige Lewis, co-editor of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. Born in Tehran, Iran, Kaveh teaches at the University of Iowa. His writing appears in the New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Since 2020, Kaveh has served as poetry editor for The Nation.
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And for my audiobook-challenged friends (you know who you are), this was one of those audiobooks where the narrator, Arian Moayed, transports you into the story—not away from it as some do.
But…. There are aspects of the book, particularly the ending, that are perplexing. I won’t go into details, but when I got through the book I kind of said “Huh?”
Maybe not a perfect book, but a good one. I look forward to more from this obviously talented author.
Akbar's poetry and prose intertwine to lay the foundation for an extraordinary story...of a mother lost and found, and reasons to live despite a lifetime of wanting to make one's death matter.
This is an important work of contemporary literature. It'll make you think, weep and be grateful.
With Cyrus Shams we are introduced to an orphaned Iranian, Cyrus, navigating a self-imposed purgatory. His journey is one of grappling with the throes of alcoholism, exploring artistic endeavors, and struggling to form and cherish meaningful friendships. He has one true friend who helps him on this journey. His fascination with mortality takes an intriguing turn when he becomes captivated by Orkideh, a renowned Iranian artist who transforms her impending demise into an art form.
This brief synopsis encapsulates what felt like an expansive journey within the book's pages. The initial segment unfolds poetically, painting vivid portraits of the quest for significance in life. However, the narrative takes a divergent path in the second part, offering disjointed tales of characters who enter and exit Cyrus's world fleetingly, some perhaps never truly existing within it. Initially challenging, this section nearly prompted me to set the book aside. Yet, just as I contemplated doing this, the narrative swiftly transitions in the third part, adopting a prose that propels the story forward with a dynamic pace.
A bridge between reality and thoughts covering real history and different perspectives to it in our simpleton perceptions.
But Akbar's mastery is that he does not get pretentious or overly philosophical. In his first novel, Akbar shows the reader that we all share the same existential anxieties no matter one's background or walk of life. What makes "Martyr" stand out as a novel about immigration is that immigrant art often tends toward self-criticism/deprecation or hostility toward the new culture. However, Akbar takes a neutral stance - by placing Ferdowsi and Mozart in their roles, he looks at humanity through the common language of art (the cliche is mine).
Top reviews from other countries
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