Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
One in every of my favourite issues to do as a reader is to leap head-first into a well-liked ebook, studying as little as attainable about it beforehand. I don’t typically get to do that as a result of well-liked books are inclined to fall on my radar full with opinions, synopses, and rankings. Nevertheless it occurred that I used to be capable of keep away from studying an excessive amount of about Martyr! earlier than I picked it up myself and so I anticipated a sure form of studying expertise based mostly on what I realized early on within the story—that this was a novel about somebody who had suffered drastically attributable to loss and habit—and bought one thing completely completely different. The story’s grand finale is what has stayed with me as a result of it speaks to how I felt all through the ebook, which is to say baffled and dazzled.
You would possibly discover that I’m not supplying you with a lot of a synopsis right here, and that’s as a result of I need to make area for you, too, to really feel baffled and dazzled. I’ll say that this can be a story about grief and the surprising approach it informs how one downtrodden artist grapples with mortality and discovering that means in life. We get some uncommon (to place it frivolously) breaks from Cyrus’s hyper-introspective perspective, and these moments make area for deep, if peripheral, quandaries and the unraveling of a peculiar thriller that bubbles up from a museum exhibition.
After studying the ebook, I didn’t do a deep dive into Akbar’s life or something, however Cyrus’s story felt self-referential and achingly private. It learn just like the story of an distinctive younger author on the verge of breakthrough in additional methods than one.