Martyr!

Hardback · 352 pages · 2024

Against Martyrdom

Cyrus Shams is newly sober and learning to live with the silence that follows. Alcohol is gone. The mind keeps talking.

In his debut novel, Kaveh Akbar follows a young Iranian American poet living in Indiana whose life has been shaped by a single story. Cyrus believes his mother died when Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down in 1988. His father raised him in the United States after that loss and worked without complaint.

The past carries scale. Cyrus’s present does not.

That imbalance drives the novel.

Cyrus studies martyrs. Death with meaning fascinates him. If the loss was enormous, the life must answer it. Martyrdom promises structure. It turns grief into narrative, where intimacy is displaced by abstraction rather than lived through.

Akbar understands the seduction in that idea. The novel is often witty. Cyrus holds imagined conversations with figures such as Lisa Simpson. There are dream sequences and philosophical riffs on death and purpose. These devices reveal a mind that turns experience into language.

At times they run long. Near the point where the story should tighten, the book drifts into reflection. Cleverness is not the problem. Duration is. The excess never collapses the novel, but it softens its pressure.

The narrative finds its centre when Cyrus travels to New York to meet Orkideh, an Iranian artist dying of cancer who has turned her final weeks into a public installation inside a museum. Visitors sit with her and speak about death while she waits for it.

Cyrus arrives expecting revelation. He believes he has found a living martyr.

What he encounters is something else. Orkideh does not romanticise death. She treats it as physical and practical. The body fails. Time shortens. The process offers no transcendence. Her clarity exposes the distance between Cyrus’s ideas about martyrdom and the reality of dying.

From that moment the novel steadies. The fantasy of symbolic death begins to lose its hold.

Sobriety grounds the book throughout. Recovery does not appear as redemption. Meetings exist in the background. The real work happens in private: routine, vigilance, refusing relapse one day at a time. Sobriety strips away grandeur. It leaves the body in the room.

The tension between Cyrus and Zee Novak becomes one of the novel’s quiet counterweights to his obsession with martyrdom. Both men are gay, and the attraction between them remains hesitant and unresolved. Cyrus can vanish into abstraction when he is alone. Another person interrupts that habit. A similar shift shapes Cleanness, where presence resists abstraction. Presence cuts through performance. It becomes harder to turn your life into myth when someone else is watching you live it.

The Iran Air disaster functions less as political argument than as the story Cyrus has built around himself. It explains the scale of his grief. It gives his life narrative weight. When that story shifts later in the novel, the scale collapses. What remains is ordinary life.

Male loneliness sits quietly beneath all of this. Cyrus distrusts stability. Intensity feels more honest to him than calm. He thinks about feeling before risking it. The novel sees this pattern clearly and refuses to flatter it.

The ending avoids theatrics. Cyrus does not become a martyr. He does not achieve transcendence.

He stays alive.

For a novel concerned with sacrifice and destiny, that choice carries more weight than any symbolic death.

Akbar is a poet first, and the prose often carries that discipline. The ambition is visible. So are the occasional excesses. Yet the novel holds together because its centre remains human.

Cyrus does not become symbol.

He becomes ordinary.

And that is the quiet refusal at the heart of the book.

Part of Reading Masculinity.