Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel asks impossible questions about death

Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar
Pan Macmillan (Picador)

Have you ever been suicidally sad, but don’t want to waste your suicide? Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar reads like that. It's an account of unprecedented experiences, a reckoning with life, grief, addiction and what art is supposed to do.

We meet Cyrus Shams, an Iranian-born American poet: nearly 30, sexually ambiguous, a recovering addict, a so-called “good” immigrant. He rarely writes but constantly aches. He is self-pitying, orphaned and profoundly sad. Once, alcohol was a kind of soulmate — faithful, omnipresent, dependable.

“Alcohol didn’t demand monogamy like opiates or meth. Alcohol demanded only that you came back home to it at the end of the night.”

That relationship is over. The drink that once fixed things can no longer fix anything.

The deepest wound in Cyrus’ life is his mother Roya’s “unspeakable” death. Months after his birth, she boarded a flight from Tehran to Dubai, hoping to reconnect with her brother Arash, a man shattered by his service in the Iran-Iraq war. That flight — real-life Iran Air Flight 655 — was shot down by a US navy warship, killing everyone on board.

Akbar doesn’t fictionalise the violence; he places it plainly, implicating history in Cyrus’ grief. That loss fractures the Shams family. Arash unravels. Cyrus’ father, Ali, moves to America with his son, trying to outrun memory and make a life again. He works a thankless job at an industrial poultry plant. He lives only for Cyrus, though the two are largely unable to connect.

Nearing 30, Cyrus is trying to make sense of his life. He becomes obsessed with martyrdom — what it means to die for something, to make your death mean something. He wants to write a book about it. He tells people this. He means it. That project, that impulse, echoes back on itself: Martyr! is both Cyrus’ project and Akbar’s. The novel becomes its own recursive artefact.

A conversation with his roommate and sometimes lover Zee sends Cyrus to Brooklyn to meet Orkideh, a terminally ill Iranian artist spending her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, speaking with strangers about death. She sits silently, listening, day after day. The set-up nods to Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present — an art-as-presence piece about vulnerability, endurance and witness. Orkideh isn’t only talking about death, she’s performing it. Her death is meaningful, deliberate. Cyrus is magnetised. He wants to write about her. He wants, maybe, to be her.

The novel is structurally chaotic on purpose. It’s schizophrenic and manic. Perspectives shift constantly: Cyrus, his father, his mother, his uncle, friends, lovers, ghosts. The timeline loops and fractures. In the early pages, the fragmentation is intoxicating, propulsive, even. But sometimes it bogs down. The energy stalls under the weight of its own philosophical density. However, Akbar’s language dazzles. The poetry is unmistakable, even in prose. There are throwaway lines about death that lodge in the throat. A quiet, sly humour threads itself through even the bleakest scenes. That’s the novel’s deepest power — its humanity. Akbar doesn’t only write about people, he builds them. Every character pulses. Every moment is lived.

Martyr! is a debut novel, but it reads like it will stand the test of time, feeling, failing, and reaching. It’s flawed, sure. The structure is, at times, a mess. But the mess feels earned. This is a novel about being alive in all its shapeless weight. It reads like Hozier and Florence + the Machine blended into a single, howling voice, an introspective smoothie about art, immigration, addiction, and death. A novel not afraid to ask impossible questions and live inside them.

It’s beautiful. It hurts.