I’m not usually a literary genre person but I saw the hype about Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and gave it a try.
PROS: Interesting perspective of Iranian man. He comes to the USA and has common problems (fitting in as a gay man, battling addiction, struggling with injustice.) The repeated mentions of the US Navy shooting down an Iranian civilian flight is a good reminder about that crime.
CONS: No real drive to the plot. I get this is a side effect of the literary genre, but it was too heavy on the introspection. That’s a minus for me. Internal anxiety and dissatisfaction I can supply all my own. I don’t need an artist for that.
SUMMARY: The book held my interest long enough so that I finished. High marks for that, and pat on the back for me for open-mindedness.
The biggest minus of all for this book? The book reviews plastered all over it. By The Holy Algorithm, they were over-the-top. “Nothing short of miraculous,” said the NYT Book Review. The New Yorker out gushed them with this gem: “Reading this prose can feel like watching an Olympic athlete perform household tasks.”
And those are the tamer ones. Are they auditioning to be the president’s press secretary?
But opinions are subjective. There’s no convincing someone who likes something that they shouldn’t like it. But I will try. As I said, the book shared a new perspective for me. Great! That’s what books are for. But I’ve already forgotten how it ended and a lot of what happened.
The breathless reviews are too much. Such a precious approach might be as dangerous as book burnings and censorship. Hype cranked to such absurdity raises a reader’s expectations so high, no work can match it. A new reader thinks, “Well, if this yawner is what they call great, I guess I don’t like reading.”
I’m a book-lover but after wading through the gushing reviews to the first page, I couldn’t help but shriek, “It’s just a book, okay?!”
Yes, there’s some poetic lines but overall, it’s a basic story with a single twist toward the end. That’s it. Decent enough to finish, good enough to enjoy, but calm down.
Or don’t. You’re welcome to your opinion and I’ll retain mine. All that insane hype makes my eyes roll with such intensity it’s got to count as a calorie-burning workout. So, thanks, I guess. I’ll have to make an effort to skip cover reviews going forward — they damaged the experience of a sensitively written book. Then again, it was the hype that caught my attention. In the end, as usual, I’m partly to blame.
Book Review: Martyr! By Kaven Akbar – link to Amazon here: https://amzn.to/3EMzEP4
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BONUS: All this annoyance at literary hype has put me in a mood to re-read this classic: A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose by B. R. Myers. (Amazon link: https://amzn.to/410l6CW) That book is 20+ years old but still applies. Book hype hasn’t changed.