I read Martyr! recently after a streak of failed reading attempts. Here’s a list of the books I didn’t finish, for fun:
The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk: This novel takes place 100+ years ago in a “health resort.” There are a lot of sick people there, all men, and they are constantly eating dinner and going on constitutional hikes in big groups, and I was just supposed to REMEMBER ALL THEIR NAMES?! Olga, I can’t.
Orbital, by Samantha Harvey: This novel won the 2024 Booker Prize, and I was like “Oh cool, a woman writing about space! This could be interesting!” Alas. It is not interesting when any gender writes about space, for me. (Exception: “Poetry and the Moon” by Mary Ruefle.) The beginning is about astronauts feeling bored and confined on a spaceship, and I felt bored and confined reading it.
Kairos, by Jenny Erpenbeck: This intensely heterosexual novel is about a 19-year-old girl having an affair with an old married professor in Berlin, which, great. They love their affair. But the girl thinks it’s somehow profound to bang a professor after he plays a bit of opera. The vibe is very like, “Were angels singing? Or was that his rare vinyl on the record player during their lovemaking?” Got too annoyed to go on.
Which is all to say: when a trusted source said Martyr! was charming and fun and readable, I decided to try it. I figured I would get to the end, and I did! I stayed up til 2am finishing it, AND WHAT AN END IT WAS.
Some context….
What is Martyr! about? (no spoilers)
The main character in Martyr!, Cyrus, is a sober Iranian poet living in the town where he went to college. He’s not writing much poetry. His parents are both dead, and Cyrus wants to die too, sort of.
But twist: He’s an aspiring martyr. He wants to die in a MEANINGFUL ways. Then he thinks, maybe I should write a book about martyrs before I become one. Martyr! is a mix of his book draft, his dreams, and less-poetic past and present narration from him and his family and friends.
Highlights of Martyr! for me (no spoilers):
Interesting reflections on recovery, insomnia, and peeing the bed
Funny!
Beautifully captures how annoying writers can be socially (drunk and sober)
Much new-to-me intel on Iranian history and culture
Love the dream sequence with Lisa Simpson
But what I really want to talk about is the end.
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Ok. What happened at the end???
We learn early in the novel that Cyrus’s mom, Roya, died in a plane crash when he was very young.
Then Cyrus goes to New York to talk to an Iranian artist dying of stage 4 breast cancer. She’s doing a performance art thing where she spends her final days in a museum chatting with the guests about death, and he’s like “Martyr alert!”
And in a very “Luke, I am your father” twist, it turns out… SHE’S ACTUALLY HIS MOM?!
She wasn’t on the plane that crashed after all. In Iran while she was pregnant with Cyrus, she had a secret affair with a woman named Leila. It’s actually LEILA who died on the plane—but she flew with Roya’s passport. It was all part of their murky plan to run away together.
The plane crash kicks off an unbelievable sequence of decisions from Roya. They are BOLD and UNLIKELY and UNEXPLAINED and they come right at the end of the book, very fast.
Decisions Cyrus’s mom makes after Leila dies in a plane crash, in chronological order
My lover just died using my passport, and I’m in my home country where my family is. I could just kinda go home and say I missed my plane. Maybe I missed it because I lost my passport. I won’t do this! I’m going to leave this country forever!
Specifically I’m going to move to New York, a place where I don’t know anyone or speak the language or have a visa to go (not to be technical but like…).
Now I’m going to chill in the U.S. for decades, plural, marry a new woman, and let my husband and baby back home think I’m dead. Every day I could call them, and every day I don’t!
Flash forward — I’m unexpectedly chatting with my son on my deathbed. Wow! I’m not going to mention that we’re related on our first, second, or third meeting.
My son is coming to see me for a fourth time tomorrow, and I could tell him I’m his mom at that time, but no. I’m actually going to OD on pain meds right now. Bye!
This is a lot. It’s possible someone on Earth could do these things, but would it be Roya? She doesn’t have the backstory for it. She barely has any backstory (besides being hot for Leila) (and running full speed into an icy lake one time). Cyrus doesn’t remember her, and we spend most of the book with him.
It makes you wonder… why DID we spend most of the book with him?
He has a lot in common with IRL Kaveh (for ex: he has internet), which probably made him the easiest character to write. But he’s not a character I need to see up close for a long time. Cyrus never takes bold action that makes me think, “Woah, what could his inner life possibly be like?” or “What consequences will this wild action have for this man?”
Not to be against writing two newsletters in a row, but to me Cyrus is defined way less by his actual writing than by what I think of as “writer mindset.” This is the thing I go to Orangetheory to dispel.
It’s an internal monologue sort of like:
I need to reflect a LOT before taking any kind of action. And until I find the exact meaningful thing I really, authentically want to do, I will just sit around reflecting, for years at a time if needed. My life moves forward mostly because of outside forces, like other people’s actions, which are inexplicable to me.
It’s just kind of inert and passive. Not what I’m looking for in a main character unless they’re INCREDIBLY observant, which Cyrus is not. He’s just… meandering around. The biggest decisions he makes are to get sober and to go to New York for a weekend. Both get explained extensively to the reader, but these are not confusing choices.
Martyr! would be way more interesting to me if Roya was the main character. HER life is overflowing with plot and passion. She acts aggressively on the world. It would be fun to see her up close. We’d still meet Cyrus at the end!
As is, the past and present plotlines in Martyr! both climax in huge, bold actions from Roya—reported to us in staccato little factoids, not unlike my list above, tbh. Why is she doing this?
It feels kind of like she did it all because SOMEONE had to do SOMETHING for this book to end!
But Mae, don’t you think Cyrus actually killed himself at the end if you Read Between the Lines?
No. My friend told me about the Reddit theory that Cyrus actually kills himself before he learns his mom’s “real” backstory, and the whole twist where she’s alive (and then dead again) is just an afterlife fantasy.
But to me that ultimately feels like sweaty Swiftie reasoning on TikTok, where someone is like “It’s obvious from all the CLUES that Taylor is a lesbian and Rep TV will drop June 2, 2025.” And the clues are like… a cloud Travis posted to his story.
To be fair, by the very end of the book, when Cyrus is talking to his friend Zee in the park, something ambiguous is unambiguously going on. I think Cyrus is dreaming or having hypothermia hallucinations or just generally tripping balls. (Otherwise why is “golden light cracking through the ground”?).
But I don’t think he killed himself—for reasons I will now list because I really want this newsletter to be short and punchy, even though it’s sooooo longgggg and I failed.
Reasons I don’t think that Cyrus subtly killed himself or that his mom’s resurrection + second death are his afterlife fantasy
If Cyrus died, the narrator would notice and tell us about it. Cyrus’s sections of the book are narrated in close third person, not first, so the narrative… presence would not necessarily die with him or go seamlessly to Another Plane or keep a HUGE secret for him.
The epilogue from the perspective of Sang — Roya’s American ex-wife — feels like confirmation that Roya genuinely lived to old age and made it to the U.S. It’s not structured like a dream dialogue, or trippy like the actual end of the book. It’s realistic, like the other sections from (real!) secondary characters’ perspectives.
I just personally expect authors to recount the CLIMAXES of their novels as clearly as they recount the other events in their novels. If you switch into secret code JUST for the biggest event in your book, the much-discussed suicide of your main character, good luck with… me liking that.
My read is that Cyrus doesn’t want to kill himself that much in the book’s present-day. Maybe that is me gaslighting a fictional man—sorry—but I think he mainly thinks suicide and martyrdom are interesting.
My guess is that in a previous and maybe recent version of Martyr!, Cyrus explicitly killed himself at the end, and then someone decided it was too sad/too pro-suicide/too proactive for the character.
Overall: The ending of this book flopped for me. But I got there (huge for me!) and had fun doing it.
Q for you
If you read Martyr!, what did you think? And more importantly, what did you think *happened*? Reply to this email! Do the Substack engagement things I don’t understand! I want to hear other people’s takes.
Linxxx
Kaveh Akbar went on Death, Sex & Money and told the host she could taste a poem he read aloud to her. She did not confirm!
Trump-era survival strategies, from me to you
How not to give up, according to Hidden Brain (I linked to the wrong ep last newsletter, oops)