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S. Zainab would like to think she bleeds ink but the very idea makes her feel faint. She writes fantasy and horror, and is currently clutching a manuscript while groping in the dark. Find her on Twitter: @szainabwilliams.
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The novel I’m recommending today epitomizes the kind of book I imagine when I imagine literary fiction: it is artistically curious; it seeks to answer or at least deeply explore profound, unanswerable questions; it takes the reader in unexpected directions; and it has no tidy or obvious beginning, middle, or end. My recommendation is the kind of book that might not appeal to everyone because of its style, but it became a critical success and it offers us a main character we don’t often get to see—a queer Iranian American. Also, importantly, I enjoyed it. I had no idea where the story was taking me and have since spent much time reflecting on the journey.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
One of my favorite things to do as a reader is to jump head-first into a popular book, learning as little as possible about it beforehand. I don’t often get to do this because popular books tend to fall on my radar complete with opinions, synopses, and ratings. But it happened that I was able to avoid learning too much about Martyr! before I picked it up myself and so I expected a certain kind of reading experience based on what I learned early on in the story—that this was a novel about someone who had suffered greatly due to loss and addiction—and got something entirely different. The story’s grand finale is what has stayed with me because it speaks to how I felt throughout the book, which is to say baffled and dazzled.
You might notice that I’m not giving you much of a synopsis here, and that’s because I want to make space for you, too, to feel baffled and dazzled. I will say that this is a story about grief and the unexpected way it informs how one downtrodden artist grapples with mortality and finding meaning in life. We get some unusual (to put it lightly) breaks from Cyrus’s hyper-introspective perspective, and these moments make space for deep, if peripheral, quandaries and the unraveling of a peculiar mystery that bubbles up from a museum exhibition.
After reading the book, I didn’t do a deep dive into Akbar’s life or anything, but Cyrus’s story felt self-referential and achingly personal. It read like the story of an exceptional young writer on the verge of breakthrough in more ways than one.
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