A deliberately provocative title that suits its protagonist, an Iranian-American poet who is painfully conflicted, heartbreakingly vulnerable, and frequently impossible ... Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor ... The serious fiction lover’s favorite kind of book, offering plenty to think about and discuss, all of it couched in brilliantly rendered prose that’s a pleasure to read. Let’s hope that Kaveh Akbar’s impressive debut is the first of many novels to come.
Incandescent ... Akbar has created an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic. But it speaks to Akbar’s storytelling gifts that Martyr! is both a riveting character study and piercing family saga.
Although Akbar has incisive political points to make, he uses martyrdom primarily to think through more metaphysical questions about whether our pain matters, and to whom ... The novel itself is almost violently artful, full of sentences that stab, pierce, and slice with their beauty ... Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself. It’s tonally nuanced—in command of a dazzling spectrum of frequencies from comedic to tragic—rigorous, and surprising.
Deep-feeling, beautifully bruised ... A darkly comic and heartrendingly earnest work. Even as it sometimes imperfectly weaves together its grand sentiments — addiction and recovery, grief and hope, love, belonging and meaning — it’s hard to be bothered by the bumps in the road when one can sit with the playful, wistful emotional resonance of Akbar’s prose ... A poet's novel.
Brilliant ... Any good novel balances the unruly mess of human behavior with the ostensible order fiction provides. The strength of Martyr! is that Akbar arranges its various messes well and doesn’t strive too hard to reconcile them.
Reading Martyr! is a delight. Sensual, oneiric and wonderfully strange, Akbar intuits the mind’s talent for distilling meaning from the surreal. His fiction taps his expertise in conjuring an experiential purity — through metaphor and with humor that lands.
I had high expectation for Martyr!, his first novel. Three chapters into it, my considerable expectations were a speck in the rearview mirror. After finishing the novel, I couldn't even remember what those expectations had been because I was too busy processing everything Akbar had accomplished in his outstanding debut ... Gripping and multilayered ... The mixture of voices, ideas, and characters shouldn't work because it's too much — but Akbar makes it work beautifully and the novel has a wonderful sense of cohesion that makes each separate element as enjoyable as the whole.
There’s something immensely appealing about a meticulously written novel whose characters (Cyrus isn’t the only one) are busily searching for meaning. It’s a pleasure to read a book in which an obsession with the metaphysical, the spiritual, and the ethical is neither a joke nor an occasion for a sermon. And it’s cheering to see a first-time (or anytime) novelist go for the heavy stuff—family, death, love, addiction, art, history, poetry, redemption, sex, friendship, US-Iranian relations, God—and manage to make it engrossing, imaginative, and funny.
Dazzling ... Akbar taps his impeccable ear to enrich this fiction début ... The narrative resolution comes into view like a city glanced outside an airplane window during final approach; and yet there's a twist, a sudden pitch of runway as the novel touches down. Akbar's ending feels operatic, orchestrated, the only technical choice I question, but it still pulses with lyrical precision.
Ambitious and expansive ... The title of the novel suggests that the narrative to come may not be as straightforward as it appears: note the cheery wink of an exclamation point ... As befitting a gifted poet, Akbar plays with form, even in prose ... There are a few plot twists along the way that cause Cyrus to revisit and revise his personal history, and future. Martyrdom—subsuming, or destroying, the self—ultimately doesn’t provide solace and meaning, but in Martyr!, art, which is the essence of creation, and has its own sense of eternity, does.
I don’t believe that critics should reduce a work of fiction to an op-ed. In this case, however, I can’t help asking: What does Akbar’s novel make of political martyrdom ... Akbar is too wise to offer a straightforward answer, but at times he appears to be presenting a critique of the concept ... Akbar’s novel isn’t about recovery or migration, but about the bewildering fact that we are born and then we die—and that’s it. How, then, can one find purpose in life? I prefer not to reveal much about the—somewhat implausible but nonetheless effective—plot twist that comes toward the end of the novel and recasts the whole story in a new light. Instead, I’ll limit myself to stating the obvious: In writing this novel about a would-be martyr lost amid the banal clichés and tired stories Americans tell themselves in order to live, Akbar has shown that the only way to make meaning out of meaninglessness is to become the author of our own story.Akbar’s novel isn’t about recovery or migration, but about the bewildering fact that we are born and then we die—and that’s it. How, then, can one find purpose in life? I prefer not to reveal much about the—somewhat implausible but nonetheless effective—plot twist that comes toward the end of the novel and recasts the whole story in a new light. Instead, I’ll limit myself to stating the obvious: In writing this novel about a would-be martyr lost amid the banal clichés and tired stories Americans tell themselves in order to live, Akbar has shown that the only way to make meaning out of meaninglessness is to become the author of our own story.
The book’s bricolage structure allows for jumps across borders, across time, that put its central character’s self-destructive habits in a compassionate frame. That a novel steeped with grief is so shockingly funny is testament to its radical authenticity
The story’s disparate elements are neatly interwoven, even if the plot device that sets up the resolution is a little far-fetched. The prose is richly expansive, chock full of elaborate similes and therapeutic introspection ... For all its well-intentioned sincerity, this novel’s emotive overkill has the effect of numbing the reader’s empathy. It’s not quite 'trauma porn', but it’s not far off.
Has a certain loudness ... Language is a saving grace, if imperfectly so ... Although a novel cannot capture what life is, its truths and inventions can powerfully gesture toward what life is like: full of both pain and pleasure, with death inevitable, and love a choice.
Akbar creates scenes of psychedelic opulence and mystery, emotional precision, edgy hilarity, and heart-ringing poignancy as his characters endure war, grief, addiction, and sacrifice, and find refuge in art and love. Bedazzling and profound.
Although there are some small missteps—the beginning of the novel spends a lot of time establishing backstory in a way that slows down the pace of the narrative, and we spend a fair amount of time with Cyrus’s sober, punk community in his home state of Indiana in a way that feels inefficient considering where the novel actually ends up heading, Akbar’s first foray into the world of fiction is certainly a successful one. This novel goes to surprisingly, brilliant, and inventive places, and Akbar’s background as a poet allows for stunning moments in the prose ... Martyr! is energetic from start to finish, and for fans of Akbar’s poetry, this novel will not disappoint. He has proven that not only is an accomplished poet, but also an exceptional fiction writer. The innovations in form, hybridity of the text, and many elements that have gone into this novel are nothing short of impeccable. Although the novel feels too self-aware at times, almost poking fun at the communities it references, it’s a sincere and open book with much to share with the world in terms of its observations, conclusion, and offerings, and Akbar is certainly a writer to follow closely in the years to come.
A modern take on the age-old story of a young person’s moral and psychological education, Martyr! is told in chapters that move back and forth in time, narrated from the perspectives of the central characters. Some voices are more convincing than others ... But overall, it is an extraordinary work of art, one of the best sobriety stories since Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, reminiscent of Zadie Smith and Anthony Veasna So in its rich evocation of immigrant lives. The glue that holds it together is Cyrus’s determination to write the novel we are reading: a contemporary exploration of how to make one’s life and death truly matter.
