A Quiet Book Review of Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
On grief, language, and morality.
Recommended by my dear friend Nikki, I picked up Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar a few months back. Initially, the cover drew me in. The simplicity, the color, the font. My perfect book cover. And then Nikki told me the plot:
Cyrus, a poet, addict, and alcoholic, has been grappling with the reality of violence his whole life. As a baby, his mother’s plane was shot down from the sky in a senseless accident. His father, wanting a better life for both of them, fled to the United States. As Cyrus grows older, he becomes obsessed with the idea of martyrs. What makes someone decide to die by their own hand for a cause? What cause could be big enough to die for? Is it noble? Or meaningless? On a quest to learn more, Cyrus travels to New York City to meet an unlikely artist.
I don’t think you need to know more than that going in. I went in relatively blind -- only skimming the blurb -- and I’m glad I did. Honestly, I picked it up because Akbar is a poet and this is his first novel. I’m always drawn to poets who write novels. (Maybe because I’d like to do the same one day?) Unsurprisingly, Akbar has a way with words. My book is riddled with tabs so that I can go back and admire his words.
This book was an easy 5 star read. It took me a while to read it simply because I wanted to savor every page. (I am also, admittedly, a slow reader.)
Martyr! explores themes of grief and flips expectations of love on its head. It gives language to the unspeakable -- war, death, morality, mortality, even language itself. I’m struggling with how to acutely describe this novel and the impact it had on me. So I think I’ll let Akbar take it away from here.
“Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.” pp. 111
“I have heard people say smell is the sense most attached to memory, but for me it is always language, if language can be thought of as a sense, which of course it can be…and we are the gods of language, everything just chirping and burping. And how fitting, too, that our superpower as a species, the source of our divinity, stems from such a broken invention.” pp. 124
“It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.” pp. 183
“Cyrus wasn’t sure how many tomorrows he had left and considered briefly that Zee might have been right, that he might not be fully inhabiting his todays.” pp. 246
“...the bud of us just starting to open. Something in the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves or miracles.” pp. 262
“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.” pp. 270
“Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: thats is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.” pp. 285