Lalita Panicker picks her favourite read of 2024

With ongoing wars and global uncertainties, it would seem to be in the order of things to write about a book which does not add further to the gloom. Unfortunately, the one that grabbed my attention was Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, which is at once sparkling in its writing and hauntingly sad in its content. Death and all its attendant horrors loom large over the book even as we come to grips with the protagonist, Cyrus Shams, an Iranian-American whose melancholy nature is compounded by his past addictions, his closeted queerness, his persecution complex, his suppressed inner poet and his profound sense of loss.

If you are looking for an easy read, this is not the book for you. But once you do start reading, you will find yourself on a tortuous journey with Shams as he navigates his mother Roya’s death, when a plane from Tehran to Dubai, where she was going to visit her brother, gets blown out of the sky by a US warship missile, a reference to a real-life incident. Cyrus lives to tell the tale as his mother did not take him along on her fateful journey. She was the glue that held the tragic family together and with her death things begin to unravel. Cyrus’s father, Ali, then decides to move to the US with him and try and begin another life in an unknown and hostile land. His grief dominates many pages of the book, and he seems to barely be able to hold on to reality. Cyrus does not take the move well and is beset with fear and terror of the surroundings, his own inner demons, and his father’s icy distance. He tries various paths to salvation – substances, art and even friends – but nothing seems able to help him combat the constant, painful guilt and depression.

With his father’s death, Cyrus’s feeling of being orphaned grows to the point of being suicidal but he never takes the final step, wanting to attribute some meaning to his sad life. In his imagination, he feels his life would have meaning if he could be a martyr like some of the people he admires, one being the man who stood defiantly in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square. He snaps out of it when he meets an artist, again Iranian, who is suffering from cancer and tells him that his obsession with martyrdom is nothing more than that of many of his ilk from his country, common and garden and not heroic or magnificent.

The beauty of this haunting story lies in the sparkling language, the attention to detail, and most of all from the promise that even from the ashes of a broken and fractured life, there can be hope for something different; not necessarily better, but on a different plane. As I said earlier, this is not an easy read but one that will make you anticipate more works from this brilliant author.