What Makes a Meaningful Death?

Title: Martyr!

Author: Kaveh Akbar

 

The Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz wrote this in his New York Times review of Kaveh Akbar's new novel:

 

"Cyrus Shams, the aching protagonist at the heart of Kaveh Akbar’s incandescent first novel, is a veritable Rushdiean multitude: an Iranian-born American, a “bad” immigrant, a recovering addict, a straight-passing queer, an almost-30 poet who rarely writes, an orphan, a runner of open mics, an indefatigable logophile, a fiery wit, a self-pitying malcontent. But above all else Cyrus is sad; profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally sad.

"His oceanic sorrows are fed by many Styxes, but the deepest and darkest is his mother Roya’s “unspeakable” death. Just a few months after Cyrus was born, Roya boarded a plane from Tehran to Dubai to visit her brother Arash, “who had been unwell since serving in the Iranian Army against Iraq.” Soon after her plane took off, it was blown up by a missile fired from a U.S. Navy warship: “Just shot out of the sky. Like a goose.”....

"In Cyrus, 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.  

"Young Cyrus tries to hold it all together, first by chatting with famous people in his dreams (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Madonna, Batman) and later through art, intoxicants, recovery and friends. But none of these palliatives eases his survivor’s guilt or stills the “doom organ,” as he calls it, “throbbing all day every day” in his throat, the siren song of the suicidaire...

"All that holds him back from the abyss is an obsessive desire for his life and his death to matter. He wants the opposite of his mother’s meaningless end, to sacrifice himself for a higher cause..." 

Insights and Opinions

+ Some of our group found the initial going difficult. Both Steve and Lois expressed some impatience with the early sections of the book, but were converts by the time they'd finished. Steve wasn't taken by the first half but was swept away by the end. Lois often gets impatient during the early pages as an author lays the groundwork, but then falls into it as themes and stories began to knit together.

+ Language is an important underlying theme throughout. Akbar is, as Diaz states, "a dazzling writer." Cyrus's musings on words -- which ones are necessary to convey meaning and which ones are not -- should be an essay on its own. One can say "May I have a glass of water, please" or just "Water" and the listener knows what's being asked. The idea of a dictionary designed to spell out the parts of speech you don't need is novel indeed. Further, Akbar's use of metaphor delights and surprises, calling the reader to stop and savor. "I thought this was one of the most beautifully written books I've read in a long time," said Margy.

+ To Steve, the inadequacy of language is one of the basic themes of what he calls "a thoroughly existential novel, which took me back to my existential years in the 70s. What is our life like? What does it mean?" Shirley balked at Cyrus's contention that "the language will never be the thing. Writing will not bring my mother back." But to Shirley, that's one of the points of writing -- to make you understand. "You wouldn't write if you didn't want people to see your writing as teaching them about something."

+ Most of us found Cyrus's poems nested between chapters to be inscrutable. Lois thought maybe that was the intention -- that Cyrus is trying to be deep but hasn't figured out yet how to write good poetry.

+ We asked ourselves this question: What is this book about? What are we to take away from it? Steve feels the book is about gay people dying for love. Liz and Linda disagreed. Instead, they believe the book's message is the self-absorption that grows out of trauma and how the protagonist must recognize and move beyond his/her own trauma to be able to see the other. As Linda said, "He is focused on having a meaningful death, but in so doing, he is also trying to figure out how to have a meaningful life."

+ Addiction is masterfully described here, both the experiences of the active addict and of the sober addict. "The self-absorption exists before addiction. Addiction is self-medication to ease the pain. Then, addiction nearly kills you and you must get sober. So, now you're sober, but the original self-absorption is still there."

+ Loose threads: There are a great many themes in this book, and some of them are dropped along the way. Cyrus's childhood bed wetting does establish him as an anxious child by nature, paving the way for understanding his anxiety-ridden adult self. But a later chapter digs back into his mother Roya's past, when she believed she was wetting the bed, was humiliated by it, and starved herself of liquids, only to discover that her brother was urinating on her while she slept. This is a powerful scene, which made us hearken back to Chekhov's gun principle -- that every story element must be necessary or it should be removed. Perhaps Akbar thought the double bedwetting theme highlighted something important in the Cyrus/Roya saga, but if so, we didn't find it.

+ Shirley was struck by the number of themes and elements about which she knew very little. "I found so much in this book that I had so many questions about, things I didn't know about." The Overton Window is one such thing, which was a new concept to Lois (and probably to the rest of us), but Google has a lot to say about it, so go look that up if you want to know more.

+ Circling back to this book's purpose, Steve had this to say: "It's about searching for the meaning of life, the meaning of death, the importance of language, American life, addiction, immigration, sex and the centrality of sex, dying for love, and finally, coming up with your own philosophy of life." Perhaps it was this surfeit of themes that left Chris without an anchor: "From the beginning to the end, I don't know what this book is about."

+ No book club discussion would be complete without at least some controversy and, in the case, it was the novel's ending. Liz asked others what they thought happens at the end. Margy, Linda and Steve all felt it was a forced happy ending. Liz was just confused as to whether or not the world was actually ending or if the apocalypse Cyrus experiences is a grandiose metaphor.

+ No one disputed that Akbar is an amazing writer. Probably the best description we've found so far is from a Kirkus review: "It's a philosophical discourse inside an addiction narrative all wrapped up in a quest novel." We couldn't have said it better.

Oddments and Telling Details

+ It took us awhile to get started, and nobody remembered to take any photos since our official photographer is off duty at the moment and the rest of us were busy. Lois was fussing in the kitchen, Steve was on tech support, and the rest of us were engaged in random motion. Next time, we'll do better, but we thank Margy for sending us this image from our Zoom chat and Chris for taking the photo. 

This photo of our group is very meta -- a bit of a fun house mirror.

+ Atticus the cat is a huge drama queen who should be the star of his own film.

+ Margy and Chris joined us via Zoom, which is challenging for them, but they are good sports about it.

Our Next Books

April 15: Poetry

We will read and discuss Michael Ondaatje's new book of poetry, A Year of Last Things: Poems. Attendees are encouraged to bring one of two of their favorite poems (by any poet) to share. Lois will host.

May 20: Book to be determined

Chris and Margy will host at Margy's house.

June 17: Someone we know and love

We will read Doorman Wanted by Glenn Miller. Jocey will host and the author will attend!