“Martyr!”: a thoughtful reflection on humanity

Cyrus Shams is waiting for a miracle. This is, at its core, the driving force behind Kaveh Akbar’s 2024 debut novel “Martyr!,” which opens with a flickering lightbulb in Cyrus’ bedroom. He interprets it as a message from God to quit drinking and pull his life together.

A year and a half later, he’s finding that his newfound sobriety makes little difference in his existential unrest. He’s an aspiring poet, but has a day job as a medical actor, pretending to be dying so that medical students can practice their bedside manner. Both of his parents are dead: his father due to a stroke and his mother in the missile strike from the U.S.S. Vincennes that in real life shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988. Cyrus has grown obsessed with the latter event and the idea of a meaningful death: his mother was a martyr, he imagines, and he will be too.

This preoccupation takes him to a performance artist living out her last days with terminal cancer as an exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum. Through his conversations with her, he gains a deeper understanding of his identity as an Iranian-American man, his long, complicated family history, and what exactly brought him to her in the first place.

Chapter epigraphs contain excerpts from Cyrus’ latest project: a “Book of Martyrs” written on a Word document containing elegies for Hypatia of Alexandria, Qu Yuan, and Cyrus’ mother, among others. “Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds,” he writes in one entry. “I want to die killing the president,” in another. Akbar’s background is in poetry, and it’s in these entries that he’s able to fully flex his lyrical muscles. His prose is nothing to scoff at, though; the English language is a sandbox for Akbar, words and phrases molded or manipulated with a kind of graceful ease that speaks to more experience with prose than he has as a debut novelist.

Cyrus floats in a strange middle ground between Iranian and American, too much of one to belong fully to the other, complicated particularly because of the American involvement in the death of Cyrus’ mother. Was she a martyr? Was she a victim? Cyrus can’t seem to decide. The book deals in dualities: Iranian and American, alive and dead (the dedication is “for the martyrs, who live”), hilarious and deadly serious.

Cyrus is both self-loathing and self-obsessed, fascinated by his own existential misery. He trudges through the novel in a haze of semi-suicidal ennui, methodically ignoring everyone who cares about him. Though Cyrus’ seemingly endless lamentations about sobriety, God, and a culture that he opines about more than engages with get old, his perspective is not the only one given time in the novel. Instead, it shutters between various members of his family, with his mother, father, and uncle given a particular spotlight; his best friend Zee; and himself. Though I typically prefer the immersion that novels narrated by one single protagonist give, the multiple perspectives offered in “Martyr!” allow the reader to have an understanding of the larger circumstances at play in the plot than just Cyrus’ cynical musings.

“Martyr!,” as suggested by the title, is not a light read, but it isn’t self-serious either. Often, the dialogue edges into overly tongue in cheek territory, and the plot, too, toes the line of unbelievability, but the book maintains a shrewd self-awareness that helps ground it in reality and mark it as an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Though Cyrus’ life may seem worlds away from the average Princeton High School student’s, his story contains valuable insights into a fundamental human curiosity: what we’re here to do. At the heart of Akbar’s novel is the question “What constitutes a meaningful life (and death)?” Cyrus’ initial stance is living “perfectly enough” without leaving “a ripple of pain” behind him, like “an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool.” But clearly, just not doing anything wrong isn’t the same as doing something right. Instead, Akbar proposes, though art may never be sufficient in correcting the world’s many shortcomings, it can give purpose and beauty to life, and isn’t that enough?