Longing for a meaningful death

The stories of addicts are all the same, as Kaveh Akbar once says in his novel "Martyr!", quoting Leo Tolstoy. "But everyone gets sober in their own way."

Thus, Akbar's hero, Cyrus Shams, believes he must pay the highest possible price for his sobriety: He wants to die and "turn his death into something useful." When it comes to addiction, however, Shams is arbitrary. He swallows and inhales anything he can get his hands on. Prescription drugs with names "like exotic flowers": Xanax, Adderall, Ambien, Neurontin, or Flexeril. Street drugs like weed, coke, MDMA, or crystal meth.

For Shams, these drugs are like new lovers; at first, they turn him on in an unfamiliar way. But Shams finds his soulmate in alcohol. Unlike opiates or crystal meth, alcohol "doesn't require monogamy." Just "that you come home to him when the night is over."

Kaveh Akbar knows what he's talking about. Born in Tehran in 1989, the author has published two poetry collections and teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in the Midwestern United States, among other places. He has been sober for ten years.

He started drinking as a teenager and was an alcoholic by the time he started college, he told the New York Times last year. At 25, when others were just discovering the thrill of intoxication, Akbar sobered up through a bet with another drinker at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

His own biography of alcoholism thus resembles that of his hero, yet it also doesn't. Like so many details in this debut novel, which landed on the National Book Award shortlist in the US, was recommended as summer reading by former President Barack Obama, and subsequently became a bestseller.

Akbar's protagonist, Cyrus Shams, is also the son of Iranian immigrants. His mother died in 1988 when he was still an infant. In a historically documented incident, a US Navy warship accidentally shot down an Iran Air passenger plane over the Persian Gulf. 290 people died, including his mother.

After his mother's death, Shams grew up with his father in Indiana, in the American Midwest. He watched VHS videos of films with John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Adam Sandler, and Eddie Murphy. As if they needed to use this pop-cultural soft power to compensate for his mother's fatal first encounter with American military power. His father drank gin from two-liter PET bottles and remained silent about his pain: about his mother's senseless death, his memories of the Iran-Iraq War, and the dull work on a chicken farm in Indiana.

When his father dies unexpectedly of a stroke, Cyrus realizes that he "only lived to guide his son safely into adulthood." Cyrus is left to fend for himself and begins to drink. Or, as the novel puts it: "The little bit of grief Shams felt, he processed, even milked, by drinking even more, consuming even more, and practically wallowing in it."

Sham's cultivated suffering becomes a job. He impersonates patients with a variety of ailments for medical exams for prospective doctors. When sober enough, he attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and writes experimental poems. When not, he claims, "I live the poems I'm not writing."

Along with his longing for death, the idea of ​​writing a book about martyrs also matured within him. He told a friend that he had spent his entire life thinking about the insignificance of his mother's death. It wasn't even tragic, just a number in an insurance company's statistics. Therefore, he was looking for a definition of the word "martyr," which included his mother.

His friends eventually tell him about an Iranian-born artist suffering from cancer who is entertaining visitors at a New York museum until her impending death. The title of this art project, inspired by Marina Abramovic's famous performance, is "Death-Speak." Shams scrapes together his father's meager inheritance and travels to New York to meet the artist with the lyrical name Orkideh. Instead of the death of a martyr, he ultimately discovers the truth about his mother.

Akbar tells the story of his hero's quest in leaps through time and from the changing perspectives of his characters: from Sham's mother's childhood in Iran in 1973, long before the Islamic Revolution, to his uncle's military service in 1984 during the Iran-Iraq War, to his father's simple life on the chicken farm in the Midwest.

The jumpy narrative style doesn't allow all characters to be equally vivid, and some of their life stories, such as that of the artist Orkideh, are somewhat neglected. At the same time, the fragility of this narrative style captures the reality of an immigrant biography like that of Akbar's hero more accurately than any linear coming-of-age novel could. Ultimately, his life is fractured, forcing him to constantly mediate between his Iranian and American identities and ask himself: How much of both is in me?

Akbar doesn't skimp on his language. Memories, for example, he once says, can be "expressed like a cloth," the details just dripping out and collecting in puddles. Stefanie Jacobs has translated this English, peppered with lyrical expressions, into apt German.

The very first pages of this novel make it clear that Cyrus Shams cannot hope for paradise, let alone God, in his death as a martyr. Thus, the martyrs he envisions as role models are not religious fanatics, but political heroes: the unknown man who stands in the way of Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square, or the Indian anti-colonial hero Bhagat Singh.

Without God and the hope of life after death, Akbar's hero, too, is left with nothing but his worldly existence. In this transcendental homelessness, he searches in vain for a meaningful death. Instead, he finds new meaning in his life, and what was already true of his unwritten poems holds true: He lives the book about martyrs, which he doesn't write until the end of the novel.

Kaveh Akbar: Martyr! Translated from the American by Stefanie Jacobs. Novel. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2025. 400 pp., CHF 33.50.