Martyr!

August 1, 2023

Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American poet and recovering alcoholic/addict (like his remarkable creator), seeks to untangle mysteries of his past that include an uncle who dressed as the Angel of Death to comfort the mortally wounded on Iran's battlefields and a mysterious mother killed when her plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf. He's guided by the voices of artists and kings to a terminally ill artist dwelling at the Brooklyn Museum. The award-winning Akbar is poetry editor of the Nation. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from October 16, 2023
Poet Akbar (Calling a Wolf a Wolf) explores the allure of martyrdom in this electrifying story of a Midwestern poet struggling with addiction and grief. Cyrus Shams, an orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, is fixated on finding meaning in the deaths of his parents—his mother in a plane that was accidentally shot down by the U.S. Navy over the Persian Gulf, his father from a stroke. His obsession strains his relationships, particularly with his closest friend and roommate Zee Novak, as does his heavy drinking and drug use. Immersed in the study of martyrs throughout history, Cyrus finds focus for his project when he meets Orkideh, an older painter foregoing treatment for her terminal breast cancer, and he realizes he has an opportunity to interview a living martyr. More details would spoil the plot, which thickens when connections are revealed between Cyrus and Orkideh as well as secrets about Cyrus’s family history that inform his conflicted feelings about pursuing a queer romance with Zee. Akbar deploys a range of styles with equal flair, from funny wordplay (“Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the right drugs in the wrong order, or the wrong drugs in the right order”) to incisive lyricism (“An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes”). This wondrous novel will linger in readers’ minds long after the final page. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified where the main character is from.

November 1, 2023
A philosophical discourse inside an addiction narrative, all wrapped up in a quest novel. Poet Akbar's debut in fiction features Cyrus Shams, a child of the Midwest and of the Middle East. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother, Roya, a passenger on a domestic flight in Iran, was killed by a mistakenly fired U.S. missile. His father, Ali, who after Roya died moved with Cyrus to small-town Indiana and worked at a poultry factory farm, has also died. Cyrus disappeared for a time into alcoholism and drugs. Now on the cusp of 30, newly sober but still feeling stuck in his college town, Cyrus becomes obsessed with making his life matter, and he conceives of a grand poetic project, The Book of Martyrs (at the completion of which, it seems, he may commit suicide). By chance, he discovers online a terminally ill Iranian American artist, Orkideh, who has decided to live out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, having candid t�te-�-t�tes with the visitors who line up to see her, and Cyrus--accompanied by Zee, his friend and lover, who's understandably a bit alarmed by all this--embarks on a quest to visit and consult with and learn from her. The novel is talky, ambitious, allusive, deeply meditative, and especially good in its exploration of Cyrus as not being between ethnic or national identities but inescapably, radically both Persian and American. It succeeds so well on its own terms that the novel's occasional flaws--big coincidences, forays into other narrators that sometimes fall flat, dream-narratives, occasional small grandiosities--don't mar the experience in any significant way. Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.

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Starred review from December 1, 2023
Orphaned, anxious, and outspoken Iranian American poet Cyrus Shams is in AA and barely scraping by. Not quite 30, he's trying to write a book about martyrs, his obsession with ""meaningful"" deaths stemming from his mother's perishing on the Iranian passenger airliner shot down by the U.S. navy in 1988. His bereft father left Tehran with his infant son to work at an industrial chicken farm in Indiana. The only remaining connection to Iran is Cyrus' uncle, who suffers from PTSD after his surreal service in the Iran-Iraq War as a battlefield angel. Living with Zee in an ambiguous friends/lovers relationship, Cyrus is tipping toward suicidal. When they learn about a martyr-in-the-making, the terminally ill Iranian American artist Orkideh and her end-of-life performance piece � la Marina Abramovic at the Brooklyn Museum, the two men go to New York, leading to a staggering revelation. 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.

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Starred review from January 26, 2024

Following two exceptional poetry collections (Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell) Akbar's debut novel arrives with plenty of expectation. Yet even within the celebrated history of poets undertaking prose fiction, this title stands out as a work of uncommon artistic assuredness and vibrancy. The sense of life that permeates the novel's pages is perhaps ironic, given the material concerns Cyrus, a young Iranian American poet in recovery who is consumed by a desire for death, if only he could find surety that his life has contributed value to the calculus of the shared cosmos. But Akbar's debut is more than mere existential ponderance or addiction saga or tale of arrested development short-circuited by personal calamity--it's a work that understands, and poignantly, painfully, details how all such narrative threads can only ever be part of the larger story of, what Akbar calls, the "now-ness" of living. As carried through by his poetic pen and perspective, the novel is also 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. VERDICT Akbar delivers a delirious but moving portrait of one man's personal reckoning, the novel's profound affection for life fully earning its title's bold exclamation.--Luke Gorham

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