Conversations about death become a celebration of life

By: Katherine Xiong

Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel “Martyr!” is a celebration of life composed of extended discussions of death. Grief is explored in a series of conversations with an array of others, real and imagined, including our protagonist Cyrus’ AA sponsor, roommate and occasional lover Zee, a dying artist named Orkideh, and many others.

Cyrus, a queer Iranian poet and recovering alcoholic, lost his mother soon after birth when she perished aboard an Iranian commercial airliner shot down by the U.S. military. As the novel begins, Cyrus is also grieving his father’s more recent death while Cyrus was in college. Haunted by both losses, he resolves to write a collection called “The Book of Martyrs” about historical martyrs from around the world, and to imagine his own future death as similarly meaningful.

“Martyr!” is filled with themes of outsider art, being Iranian in America, Islamophobia, racism and cultural identity. For example, Cyrus and Orkideh satirize the Western stereotype of Muslim men as religious extremists with sarcastic discussions of Cyrus’ desire for a glorious death, “like all Iranian men!”

Akbar starts with an epic, Homeric plot, yet adapts it to center upon despair rather than action. Cyrus is no Achilles, creating his legend with glorious combat on the Trojan plains; instead his feats consist of philosophical conversations and fragments of poetry.

Cyrus’ interlocutor Orkideh offers the following:

Here’s what’s important: I was Iranian, then I was Iranian in America. I made lots of art. Some of it was quite good, I think. Plenty wasn’t. But I was alive for a long time, long enough to make a lot of art. Creativity didn’t live in my brain any more than walking lived in my legs. It lived in every painting I ever saw, every book I ever read, every conversation I ever had. The world was full enough that I didn’t need to store anything inside myself. 

I wore gold jewelry that warmed in sunlight. I made my friends smile. I did not linger to see what my enemies did … To the extent that I was a fraud, I was no less than anyone else. I was grafted onto my living from a part of the universe that remains nameless, like smoke rising from a great fire.

This is Akbar’s core message: life is not a series of heroic feats like those of Achilles, but a series of conversations. When we make art, we are not creating ex nihilo but talking to the artists who came before us. By forming communities with others, we make art out of our own lives. 

There’s a whole tradition of novels about writers and the fraught ways in which a life in the written word conflicts with the world, from James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” to Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Whereabouts.” Despite their remarkable literary achievement, they speak most clearly to other writers, perhaps more willing to indulge stylistic experiments that general readers might consider pretentious. “Martyr!” achieves its broader appeal not in spite of its stilted, incongruous intimacies, but through them. 

As Cyrus bumbles through his life, unheroic in his hapless flights of fancy and bouts of melancholy, Akbar reminds us that life is messy and difficult and we make art to find meaning in it. In so doing “Martyr!,” ostensibly all about death, becomes a celebration of life. 

Martyr! | By Kaveh Akbar | Knopf | 2024 | 352 pp. | $28

Katherine Xiong is a writer and Buffalo Hive Book Critic. you can find more information about her and her work here.