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A review by evercaramia
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

 Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is a poignant novel about art, mortality, and our relationships with each other. About history and nations and the way people touch each others lives.   

It’s about this young Iranian-American Poet who travels to New York to speak with a famed Iranian artist Orchida. Orchida is dying from breast cancer, and as her last sort of art piece or declaration, is living in a mueseum as part of the exhibit called “Death Speak”. She simply will talk to anyone who visits candidly about death, about life, whatever they want to talk to her about. 



Cyrus, our poet, is a sober orphan with an obsession with martyrdom and death. He himself wants to die, but he wants it to having a meaning greater than simply nonexistence. He’s funny and cynical and such a loser but also incredibly talented and poetic. 
The book switches from his perspective to his late father’s, to his mother’s, who died when he was a baby, her commercial flight shot down by an American military pilot. It flips to excerpts of his book, “Earth Martyrs”., and even to Persian History, about a poet who worked on one great poem for over 30 years for an ancient king.

We see his best friend and lover’s perspective, Z, a sweet, funny guy who tends to breeze through life and through his love for Cyrus, enables him.

  This book was incredible read. One I think I will carry with me for a very long time.

“Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it”.
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