In Martyr!, the debut novel by Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar, a troubled young man is searching for a reason to live. Cyrus, the son of an Iranian migrant factory worker in Indiana, lost his mother in an infamous 1988 air disaster, when a US missile cruiser mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in the final months of the Iran-Iraq war. This formative trauma has left a terrible legacy: when we meet him, in his late 20s, he’s a recovering alcoholic, struggling with fragile mental health and an unhealthy dependency on pharmaceutical sedatives; he “often wept for no reason, bit his thumbs till they bled”.
An aspiring but unproductive writer, Cyrus has a fixation with martyrdom, and is researching a book on the subject. “It’s not an Islam thing,” he clarifies, “[it’s] about secular, pacifist martyrs. People who gave their lives to something larger than themselves.” To this end he travels to New York and interviews an older, terminally ill Iranian artist, Orkideh, who is exhibiting herself in a Marina Abramović-style exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. They strike up a tender rapport, and Cyrus gradually begins to work through his issues.
