ŷ������

I thought Martyr was going to be a literary no-brainer for me, a novel that I wouldn't even have to think about because it was pretty much guaranteed that I'd love it. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

I want to start by saying that Martyr is not a bad novel, but rather an unsuccessful one (to me at least). My fundamental issue with it is that it feels like a collection of parts rather than a cohesive whole. Its parts feel disjointed, out of step with each other, not quite amounting to a narrative that feels effective or purposeful. To me, the novel was missing those interstitial parts that make a sequence of chapters feel like a story rather than just...a sequence of chapters. We get chapters from Cyrus's POV, chapters from his father's POV, chapters from his mother's POV, chapters where Cyrus dreams up conversations between characters and historical figures, and I think, put together, those POVs didn't particularly work. It's not that I'm opposed to these kinds of POVs, or to multiple POVs in general, but more that I didn't think the novel gave them enough time and space to feel fleshed out. The result being that they felt like pit stops in the narrative, interruptions that jolted the book's main plot rather than additions that felt necessary to, and interwoven with, that main plot.

Structure aside, I did appreciate this novel's attempts to explore certain ideas; thematically--though not stylistically--it reminded me a little of The Idiot + Either/Or by Elif Batuman. Both are very much rigorously existential novels: where Batuman's novels question particular templates by which we're expected to live (heteronormative relationships, the either/or of living an aesthetic vs. ethical life), Martyr is interested in the question of how to give life meaning through death--its central focus being, of course, martyrdom.

I said I appreciate Martyr's attempts to explore this topic, but that's exactly it: it attempts, but it doesn't succeed. I could tell what the novel was trying (very, very hard) to do, and I could also tell that its attempts were not bad, but ultimately those attempts missed the mark for me. And critically, where a novel like The Idiot is sustained by Batuman's incredibly sharp and wry writing, the writing in Martyr is not strong or distinct enough to sustain its similarly cerebral and introspective story.

Martyr is a novel that has so much potential, and yet never comes together. I started it expecting to love it--it seemed, by all accounts, like just the kind of novel I'd love--and finished it confused because all those things I'd expected to love were present in the writing but not effectively written. The writing is fine but not equal to such an internal story (I was expecting a lot from the writing given that the author is a poet but it didn't really wow me), and the story itself felt scattered and underdeveloped. Altogether, I was left pretty disappointed by this one.