Martyr!

A Novel

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Kaveh Akbar: Martyr! (2024, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)

English language

Published March 20, 2024 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

ISBN:
978-0-593-53762-6
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1 star (1 review)

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.

5 editions

reviewed Martyr!: a Novel by Kaveh Akbar

Juvenile, masturbatory garbage

1 star

This guy crammed every “insightful” or “profound” observation or opinion he had when he was 19 into this semi-autobiographical “anti-hero,” a loathsome pretentious self-obsessed hipster.

Every page revealed new horrors of gobsmacking incompetence.

A character actually says “I remember [that thing] really heebying my jeebies” and doesn’t immediately get strangled.

There are three separate metaphors about “a bowl of milk”:

  • "Something delicate released in my chest, like a gold ring dropping in a bowl of milk."
  • "A few stars floated around like the last Cheerios in a bowl of black milk."
  • "Dark clouds against a bright sky, like blackberries in a bowl of milk."

This book is bad.

Subjects

  • Fiction, family life, general
  • Fiction, erotica, lgbtq+, general
  • Fiction, cultural heritage
  • New york (n.y.), fiction
  • Fiction, coming of age