BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Martyr!: A Novel (Kaveh Akbar, author)
Iranian-American young man, alcoholism, addiction, recovery, trauma, gay life, death of parent, writer-poet, performance art, martyrs, Persian history and poetry, terminal illness, plot twist
Kaveh Akbar brings a fresh voice to contemporary literary fiction in Martyr!: A Novel. His protagonist, Cyrus Shams, is a tortured soul. He is an alcoholic, an addict, a poet and writer, and a gay man. Cyrus is the son of an Iranian immigrant father. His mother was killed on Iranian Air civilian flight 655, a plane erroneously shot down by the USS Vincennes in July of 1988. The tragedy of Iranian flight 655 is factual; the novel is fiction.
We meet Cyrus in his recovery, at sea with his writing and struggling to gain the footing he needs to build his life. Cyrus was and remains deeply traumatized by his mother’s death. Roya boarded Iranian flight 655 just months after Cyrus’ birth, leaving him in the sole care of his father. Father and son immigrated to the United States when Cyrus was an infant. Cyrus’ father was emotionally scarred and an alcoholic himself. Cyrus led a fairly solitary childhood He dabbled in drugs and alcohol at an early age. During his college years, however, Cyrus develops strong friendships, including his friendship with Zee, a drummer and his sometimes lover.
Akbar exquisitely captures Cyrus’ struggle to build a life founded in sobriety. He draws an analogy between living sober to Michalangelo’s sculpting of his David, “It is easy. You chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” Cyrus muses,
I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here, and what can I make of not?”. . . .
… Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It means learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and f%@* and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You're moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s a miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet.
Cyrus is obsessed with the notion of death, and contemplates suicide more than the average twenty-something. Cyrus’ is a writer and his work is inspired by the lives of martyrs throughout history. Their deaths and their causes occupy Cyrus’ thoughts and populate his poetry. Even in his part-time job Cyrus acts out death scenarios. He work as actor playing the role of terminally ill patients as a part of a clinical program training medical students to deliver terminal diagnoses to patients. Though spiritual, Cyrus is not particularly religious and he struggles to identify a purpose sufficient to give meaning to his own often-imagined possible future death; he acknowledges that he likely would not qualify as a martyr without any higher cause or commitment. He wryly reflects that he has become a bit of a trope–a young Iranian poet obsessed with death and contemplating martyring himself, but without a cause in which to believe.
As Cyrus’ book idea begins to take shape, he learns of a terminally ill performance artist, named Orkideh. Orkideh has stage IV cancer and has mounted a performance art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The exhibit is titled, Death-Speak. In it, Orkideh sits in a sparse room and interacts one-on-one with members of the public. and engages in individual conversations for the remainder of her life, however long that may be. Cyrus and Zee decide to travel to New York so Cyrus can interview her.
Akbar’s description of Orkideh in the gallery is breathtaking in its complexity:
If art’s single job was to be interesting, then the room with Orkideh sitting in it was art of the highest order. The artist’s tiny living body is swallowed by an inorganic frenzy of clothing, shadow. The eroded surfaces of Orkideh’s face were like Martian crags and craters that, like a perfect photograph, caught in astonishing clarity the entire spectrum of visible light from pure light to pure dark. . . .
One could paint the scene and hang it next to a Vermeer or a Caravaggio for parallel master studies in isolation, in the drama of light and dark playing against basic shapes. There was an almost operatic quality to the simple contours competing with each other for the eye’s attention–Orkideh’s round skull, her billowing black dress–and bare feet . . . .
Over the course of several visits to the museum, Cyrus meets with Orkideh. Their conversations inspire and focus him. Orkideh, also Persian and well-educated, understands Cyrus’ literary, cultural and poetic references and brings an informed, candid and non-romantic view of death to the table for Cyrus. She both validates and challenges him as a writer. Their meetings are brief; Cyrus must give way to other museum patrons waiting to meet Orkideh, but he returns for additional visits.
Before Cyrus has exhausted his questions for the artist, her life ends and Cyrus is stunned. She has taken her own life. Cyrus is contacted by Orkideh’s gallerist and former wife, Sang. Here the novel takes a surprising twist that I will not spoil here.
The final chapter of the book, before the coda, is a beautiful chapter about rebirth, self-realization and forgiveness. Akbar uses nature to augment Cyrus’ newfound sense of peace and ease, and the dawning of his appreciation of his love for Zee. Akbar’s gift for language and imagery gives depth to the arc of Cyrus’ experience, his emotion and his growth:
Songbirds were darting almost imperceptibly across the sky, wailing broken half ballads back and forth to their mates. Two pigeons crashed into each other, then flew off in the same direction. . . .
The ground was breathing, revealing tiny little golden fissures in the earth as it swelled. The trees dropped their flowers, then their branches, to the ground–slowly, almost delicately, like new lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time. The sky had gone from white to gray to bright orange, a great cigarette sucked back to life. There was thunder but no rain. Or maybe not thunder, but great cracking sounds all around.
Pick up Martyr!: A Novel for its novelty and for the buzz surrounding it. Savor it for its fresh voice and novelty and strikingly beautiful mastery of language.
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