Join a book club that is reading Martyr!: A novel!
Martyr!: A novel
A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
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Community Reviews
Loved this book! So many sentences in here I want to save, and savor, and cry that I couldn't put words together like that. Pure genius.
Cyrus Shams is an Iranian American who grew up in Indiana with his father. When he was just a few months old and they were still living in Iran, his mother was on a plane that was shot down in a supposed accident by the American military. His grief-stricken father packs him up and starts a new life in America.
Cyrus grows up in the shadows of this loss and grief and even as a child has trouble sleeping and issues of depression. He is a poet and a writer but also an alcoholic and addict, in recovery. Again. He is searching for the meaning of life. He learns about an artist who is putting on her final show at Brooklyn Museum. She is dying, and she's going to share her dying with museum visitors. He decides he needs to go and meet her. He is inspired to write about martyrs, who have made a meaning of their life through death. He meets the artist, Orkideh, and she seemingly wants to talk to him longer than other visitors, asks him to come back. He comes back every day and is at once inspired and deflated by her.
Incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking, but also at times funny and entertaining. A masterpiece.
Cyrus Shams is an Iranian American who grew up in Indiana with his father. When he was just a few months old and they were still living in Iran, his mother was on a plane that was shot down in a supposed accident by the American military. His grief-stricken father packs him up and starts a new life in America.
Cyrus grows up in the shadows of this loss and grief and even as a child has trouble sleeping and issues of depression. He is a poet and a writer but also an alcoholic and addict, in recovery. Again. He is searching for the meaning of life. He learns about an artist who is putting on her final show at Brooklyn Museum. She is dying, and she's going to share her dying with museum visitors. He decides he needs to go and meet her. He is inspired to write about martyrs, who have made a meaning of their life through death. He meets the artist, Orkideh, and she seemingly wants to talk to him longer than other visitors, asks him to come back. He comes back every day and is at once inspired and deflated by her.
Incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking, but also at times funny and entertaining. A masterpiece.
The last 50 pages of this book really make you question what you're reading. But - its a beautiful meditation on art, life, love and what we all live and die for.
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