"I felt dizzy again from aliveness. Flush with baffle and excitement, like the first person to touch snow."
Martyr! is a novel that deserves a reader's full attention. Kaveh Akbar's 2024 powerhouse has narrative momentum, inventive architecture, and prose that sings. Twenty-seven-year-old Cyrus Shams is a memorably flawed, thoroughly modern protagonist, one you will root for at the same time you're laughing at his frequently comic missteps. My sole regret connected to this recent reading experience has nothing to do with either this exemplary book or author.
Upon finishing a highly lauded, maddeningly discursive novel I'd started on the same day as Martyr!, it was clear that reading the two novels at the same time was a tactical error. My mistake was apparent from the moment my full attention turned to Akbar's tour-de-force. After reviewing the few notes I'd made to that point about Martyr!, I then re-read a few earlier key passages. Good decision. From that point, I was re-assured that I'd been in capable hands all along. Any previous doubts? Misplaced. I had quite simply bit off more than I could chew.
Though I don't plan to abandon my longstanding practice of sometimes reading more than one book at a time, I am re-considering my approach, effective immediately. If a dense or discursive book is using an undue amount of my mental bandwidth, I now plan to devote my energy to that book alone. I owe that to storytelling prose stylists as talented as Kaveh Akbar.
"They sat there ... each quietly measuring the texture of the silence, the history between them."
No comments:
Post a Comment