by Kaveh Akbar ★★★★☆
"If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing."
In the novel Martyr! we are introduced to main character Cyrus Shams, a twenty-something living in Indiana, muddling through life and trying to stay sober. He's Iranian by birth, but was brought to the U.S. as a baby by his father, shortly after his mother was killed aboard Flight 655, a real-life event in which a U.S. Navy warship mistakenly shot down a passenger aircraft in 1987.
Cyrus is floundering. While he is managing to stay sober, his life feels like it lacks meaning, and he finds himself straddling every major identity group with which he might associate, leaving himself unsure of who he is:
"He felt completely awash in time: stuck between birth and death, an interval where he'd never quite gotten his footing. But he was also awash in the world and its checkboxes—neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk nor in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim."
He's a writer and a poet, and as he searches for identity and meaning in his life, he develops an obsession around martyrs. "I want my having-been-alive to matter," Cyrus says, and for him, that eventually translates into architecting a meaningful death for himself. As he continues to focus on the subject, he becomes aware of an artist in New York City who is staging a final exhibition. A post from the Brooklyn Museum reads "Internationally renowned visual artist Orkideh presents her final installation, DEATH-SPEAK. Visitors will be invited to speak with the artist during the final weeks of her life, which she will spend onsite at the museum."
"It's so exactly what I've been wanting to write about, how to make a death useful," Cyrus says to his best friend Zbigniew "Zee" Novak. He makes the decision to scrounge up enough cash to get to New York and meet Orkideh, and Zee agrees to accompany him.
The novel is undeniably well-written. It's mostly sad, with an undercurrent of anger, but in parts balances that with redemption and hope. Despite all of its positive qualities, though, I wouldn't call Martyr! a particularly enjoyable read. There are weird tangents, dream sequences, flashbacks...but in general there is the consistent theme of Cyrus's attempts to make sense of his life. "Nobody thinks of now as the future past," Cyrus says at one point, as he grapples to ascribe the same level of care and importance to his daily life that one might when traveling back in time ("When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, 'gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.'"). But despite his passion for finding meaning and living in the now, we watch him consistently screw up relationships and shirk his responsibilities.
It's one of those books that I can appreciate, but it doesn't have that, "you have to read this!" quality, and despite it being filled with thought-provoking passages. I don't even know if it rises to "you should read this." It's a book that I can appreciate, but I doubt I will recommend broadly.
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