A Wild Vertiginous Year: A Guest Post by Kaveh Akbar
Our Discover prize finalist is finally out in paperback, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to get this exquisite book into the hands of even more readers. After an incredible year of publication — like getting shortlisted for the National Book Award — author and poet Kaveh Akbar has penned an exclusive essay for us on writing Martyr!, down below.
Paperback
$16.00
$18.00
Martyr!
Martyr!
By Kaveh Akbar
In Stock Online
Paperback
$16.00
$18.00
Poignant and darkly comic, smart and sharp, Akbar’s novel is a life-affirming story of addiction and art, love and loss. This unraveling of mysteries such as art, family and martyrdom will appeal to fans of Tommy Orange and James McBride.
Poignant and darkly comic, smart and sharp, Akbar’s novel is a life-affirming story of addiction and art, love and loss. This unraveling of mysteries such as art, family and martyrdom will appeal to fans of Tommy Orange and James McBride.
It has been a wild vertiginous year full of profound public grief and small private joys, public celebration and private struggle. It’s hard to square it all in my head. I had been dreaming with the characters in Martyr for years before the book was published. Some of those dreams are in the book. It’s strange to see the characters now in the world, to hear other people talking about them. It’s thrilling! And deeply uncanny. I’m new to it.
I came up as a poet. I still think of myself as a poet. It feels funny to be speaking about myself in paragraphs. Cyrus, the protagonist of my novel, is a floundering recently-sober orphan trying to write his way out of a sense of eclipsing cosmic abandon. He has a job as a medical actor pretending to die for anxious medical students. He’s Iranian, lives in the American Midwest, does all the wrong drugs and sleeps with all the wrong people. It seems a bit of a miracle to me that anyone not blood related to me cares about him. He feels like such a specific cross section of my singular(ly weird) brain.
But then, when I think about my favorite writers—Borges, Morrison, Nabokov, Woolf—they’re all speaking in a singular unprecedented idiom. Like, you read the Bluest Eye and it looks like English, it sounds a little like English, but it’s not English, it’s Morrison. Borges is writing in Borges. Dickinson wrote in Dickinson. Anne Carson said of Paul Celan that he “translated German using German.” That’s the highest praise one can give an author, I think. That’s the horizon towards which I was trying to move with Martyr!, writing the very specific thing nobody else in the history of my species could have written.
I love Celan and Dickinson and Morrison and Borges. I also love The Simpsons and the Milwaukee Bucks and Sonic Youth and Erykah Badu. A true wellspring of joy for me has been getting to talk to people across all these axes while touring with Martyr!. It’s all in the book. I don’t have one lobe of my brain for wondering about God and another for quoting old Simpsons jokes with my spouse and another for thinking about nationhood and another for listening to the Rolling Stones. It’s all just in there, sloshing around. I love thinking about the novel that way, just a big refrigerator door where you get to hang pictures of everything you love.
The Roman poet Horace said art should “delight and instruct.” I take that seriously. I hope the paperback introduces these characters to more people for whom they might be useful, or provide some measure of delight, amongness, illumination, surprise. I read Martyr! as a fundamentally positive story. It is worthwhile to remain alive, I think, even amidst the amidst.
