Martyr!
An Iranian-American poet and recovering addict searches for a meaningful death. Akbar's debut novel is funny, profound, structurally inventive, and deeply moving about addiction, exile, and the hunger for purpose. One of the strongest debut novels of the decade.
Cyrus talks like a poet, and so, several readers complain, does everyone else around him, dead or alive. The detours into other narrators, especially his mother Roya’s chapters, read to some as interruptions rather than deepening, and a critic concedes the book has “forays into other narrators that sometimes fall flat.” One reader who finished anyway calls the experience “Martyrdom was achieved by having to finish this book,” and another dismisses the whole run at acclaim as “Booker bait extraordinaire.” A third puts a finer point on the prose itself: “you can tell it’s written by a poet!” meant as a complaint, not a compliment.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
