Martyr!

Cyrus Shams is a 20-something insomniac, recovering alcoholic/substance abuser, two years sober. He is also a wannabe poet and is obsessed with being a “martyr” as he would describe martyrdom in the sense that Socrates, Abraham Lincoln and Alexei Navalny were martyrs, that is to say he wants to have a meaningful death. He comes by his mental landscape with definite psychological plausibility as he is the son of a functioning alcoholic Iranian-immigrant father who died only two-months after Cyrus left for college (as if he was just waiting for that event) and a mother who (he has always been told) died in 1986 while Cyrus was still a baby, when she was a passenger on Iran Air flight 655 which was infamously shotdown by the USS Vincennes. The stories of his father and mother are interleaved in flashbacks throughout the book. Having graduated college (on the 6-year plan) and in spite of Cyrus’ stated obsessions and ambitions he is mainly just drifting through life: his main “job” is to roleplay dying patients at an Indiana teaching hospital and he supplements that steady small income with various dubious side hustles. His latest project is to write a poetry book about martyrs (which he sees as a step towards his ultimate, but unfocused goal of martyrdom). One day his closest friend (and sometime lover) reads about a museum exhibit (“Death Speaking”) in New York City where a well-known Iranian artist with terminal cancer lives in the museum and where each day she gives freeform interviews to whomever lines up to speak with her. It doesn’t take much convincing for Cyrus to agree that meeting the dying artist seems like its just too perfect an opportunity for him get out of drift-mode, to act on his aspirations. I’ll stop there. The book is touching, sad, funny and poetic in equal measure.

“How did you discover this?” I whispered to Leila, sitting down with my back to the lake, kicking my feet out to hang into the giraffes’ enclosure. Leila shrugged mysteriously, smiling at my side. We sat there in silence for five minutes, ten, watching the giraffes do basically nothing, just stand there and chew sadly, I never thought about how sad something could look chewing.”

Spoilers

Cyrus is a selfcentered jerk. The dying artist, Orkideh, is in fact, his mother who did not die in 1986 but did escape Iran. (She lent (swapped) her passport to her lesbian lover so her lover could escape from Iran. Then she semi-sponaneously used her lover’s passport to leave by train. All the women took their document photos wearing the chador and so mostly looked alike in passports.) Yeah this is kinda contrived but the book’s other positive aspects outweigh this.