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Now a Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction 2024
Booker bait extraordinaire, and I'm here for it! This is an over-ambitious, messy romp, and I love it for being daring, out there, and eccentric. Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet, and his fiction debut tells the story of Iranian-American wannabe-poet Cyrus Shams who figures that to make his life count, he should ponder what a meaningful death constitutes. An orphan who is recovering from what you would have to call multitox addictions, he sets out to craft a book on martyrdom, and Akbar does not only give us snippets from this ouevre, no: In a mosaic of timelines and perspectives, he tells us the story of Cyrus' family members and their deaths.

Cyrus' mother Roya was on her way from Teheran to a PTSD ward in Dubai to visit her brother who had been tasked to patrol the killing fields in the Iran-Iraq war when her plane suddenly crashed: She was one of the passengers of that was shot down by the US, which led to huge international criticism until the case was finally settled before International Court of Justice. What drives Cyrus insane is that his mother's death was, in the grand scheme of things, meaningless to the world. After the tragedy, his father Ali took him to Indiana and worked on a poultry farm while simultaneously self-destructing.

Grown-up Cyrus, looking for direction and inspiration, befriends Orkideh, a female Iranian-American artist who suffers from terminal cancer and stages a performance similar to 's "The Artist Is Present": She sits in gallery and talks to anyone who joins the line. We also get insomnia-induced hallucinations feat. Trump, Lisa Simpson, etc. We get bisexual love. Iranian poets. Impressionistic scenes. Witty conversations. Beautiful, surprising metaphors. Akbar goes all in.

And sure: You could also see this as a weakness, that it's over-the-top, too much. But I love the playfulness with which this author addresses one of the oldest themes in literature and philosophy: The search for meaning. How can an Iranian-American ex-addict and aspiring poet with nothing to show for himself but a profound knowledge of grief and anger turn into one of his ideols, Joan of Arc or early Muslim leader Hussain? How to ascribe meaning to the apparently meaningless, how to endure it? The deep humaneness of Cyrus also lies in the silliness of trying to frame tragic life events as martyrdom: This is literature that laughs about literature, about the stories we tell to generate meaning, but not in a condescending, but in an empathic way.

Flawed? Yes. But interestingly so, and also brave and imaginative.