Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

 ´It´s so exactly what I´ve been wanting to write about, how to make a death useful´.

Kaveh Akbar writes beautiful poetry. The kind of beauty that hurts because it is revealing all those unspoken words of life. 

Martyr! is his first novel, where he includes some poetry intermezzo as well, attributed to his main character. Cyrus Sham. Born in Iran, he lost his mother during the 1988 downing of a commercial Iranian airline by the US Navy. He moved to the States with his father, who worked his whole life in a chicken farm, and died shortly after he entered college. In and out of addiction, Cyrus is trying to write a book about death. About how death can be meaningful, either through the act itself, or the society scenery - arts, religious renditions. And by an accident of fate, he got to meet Orkideh, a dying artist, also from Iran, doing a life - and death - show in Brooklyn, spending her last days as a happening.

Filled with ancient and recent historical and cultural references, and moving into a precise cultural realm, this book is also a finely written prose. It pushes the limit of thinking outside of our mental comfort zone while imagining worlds we ignore they exist. 

Existential as it tries to re-enact life and death, Martyr! is writing about the brutality of life as writers rarely write those days. With passion and taking the risk of deeply thinking about death in itself.

Rating: 5 stars