By Kaveh Akbar Fiction/Picador/Paperback/352 pages/$19/Amazon SG ( amzn.to/3KalGWG ) 5 stars At 28, former alcoholic Cyrus Shams’ new life of sobriety is still a cocktail of insomnia and suicidal thoughts. The orphaned Iranian-American poet stares into the abyss, but he does not want to “waste his one good death”.
He is a wannabe martyr – if that word is not too cliched for an Iranian and too incendiary in an Islamophobic world. He wrestles with his fixation on martyrdom by starting to write a book on historical martyrs such as the Indian anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh and Chinese poet-aristocrat Qu Yuan. Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar, who has written openly about his old alcohol addiction and depression, might have written a protagonist that hews close to his biography.
But this brilliant debut novel is not a memoir disguised as fiction – it is a resoundingly contemporary novel of great invention and ideas. Akbar has fashioned a compelling character in Cyrus from his own experience of a poet’s life adrift. But, like the Persian mirror art of finely cut glass shards he cites, Akbar shatters his own story only to rearrange it into an unforgettable portrait of the downtrodden and righteous Cyrus.
To guard against meaningless life, Cyrus is adamant to avoid futile death. His mother, Roya, died a martyr when he was a mere baby. She was one of 290 people killed on board Iran Air Flight 655, based on an actual event where the United States Navy shot down t.