MARTYR! by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus Shams is a 30-year-old Iranian-American with a death wish.  The only thing stopping him from committing suicide is that he wants his death to matter.  The book he is writing about martyrs is supposed to be his legacy, if he could just actually manage to write it.  When he was three months old in Iran, his mother’s commercial flight to visit her brother was shot down by an American Navy missile cruiser.  Hence Cyrus’s obsession with meaningless death.  Ironically, Cyrus’s father takes a job on a chicken farm in Indiana, so that Cyrus grows up in the country whose military killed his mother.  As an adult, Cyrus struggles with addiction, particularly alcoholism, but has been clean for two years when he travels to New York to meet an artist dying of cancer.  There is a twist at the end of this book, but it is not sufficient to redeem the rest of this slow-paced, depressing novel.  Also, the twist results from a very implausible coincidence, making the plot more absurd than thought-provoking.  My biggest problem with the book, though, is that provides no real incentive to keep reading. Its best value is that of a cure for insomnia, as drowsiness set in whenever I tried to read more than five pages at a sitting.