Martyr!: The Instant New York Times Bestseller
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Description
“The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.” —Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and Furies
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
Book Information
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I was very excited for this novel because many critics hailed this the “book you have to read this year!” A while back I had decided to stay away from current publications because time and time again, I was disappointed by texts that had been hyped and praised. Now I tried again and…well, I am quite disappointed again. This novel never managed to draw me in. I never started caring for any of the characters because they all feel distant, flat, often too constructed and thus inauthentic. There are quite a few instances in which a character acts or speaks in a highly dramatic fashion but that drama never feels natural or fitting. On a structural level, this novel is not really noteworthy. The author tries to present different voices in the many chapters of this text but these voices all feel the same - unison. As for the thing I have read most praise about, the language, I do not see what other people apparently see in this novel. It is the debut novel of a poet and many critics conclude that this shows, that despite some flaws, the language used in this novel is poetic and beautiful and so on. Quite frankly, I do not see it. Sure, there are some good passages / sentences here and there but nothing ever really stands out. I was never “wowed”. Often the poetic language was part of the drama that I have mentioned above. But as such, it felt cheap and unoriginal. Too many paragraphs in this novel end with forced similes, which follow the same structure: end of a sentence/paragraph + comma + “like…”. It actually became annoying. Finally, I feel that this novel was published too early. It feels unfinished, not fleshed out and would have needed some extra work. It does absolutely not justify the hype.
Description
“The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.” —Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and Furies
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
Book Information
Posts
I was very excited for this novel because many critics hailed this the “book you have to read this year!” A while back I had decided to stay away from current publications because time and time again, I was disappointed by texts that had been hyped and praised. Now I tried again and…well, I am quite disappointed again. This novel never managed to draw me in. I never started caring for any of the characters because they all feel distant, flat, often too constructed and thus inauthentic. There are quite a few instances in which a character acts or speaks in a highly dramatic fashion but that drama never feels natural or fitting. On a structural level, this novel is not really noteworthy. The author tries to present different voices in the many chapters of this text but these voices all feel the same - unison. As for the thing I have read most praise about, the language, I do not see what other people apparently see in this novel. It is the debut novel of a poet and many critics conclude that this shows, that despite some flaws, the language used in this novel is poetic and beautiful and so on. Quite frankly, I do not see it. Sure, there are some good passages / sentences here and there but nothing ever really stands out. I was never “wowed”. Often the poetic language was part of the drama that I have mentioned above. But as such, it felt cheap and unoriginal. Too many paragraphs in this novel end with forced similes, which follow the same structure: end of a sentence/paragraph + comma + “like…”. It actually became annoying. Finally, I feel that this novel was published too early. It feels unfinished, not fleshed out and would have needed some extra work. It does absolutely not justify the hype.