Kindle. Prompted by Francine Prose's review in the New York Review of Books.
Briefly Iranian-American poet Cyrus Shams goes from his squalid bedroom in an Indiana college town to NYC in the hope of drawing artistic inspiration from a terminally-ill Iranian-American woman's dying-in-public installation. Unfortunately there's just too much repetition, too much unnecessary fleshing out and recycling of well-known-from-the-internet tropes (e.g. the Overton window, Marina Abramović's performance art). It's very much of the U.S. East Coast: art galleries, openings, pan sexuality, addiction, everyone everywhere pining for NYC. We're shown a woman on a plane that is shot down by the USA but we later realise that this was only for the purpose of actively misleading us. The pivotal loss of cabin pressure is ineffective when it comes; the critical moment is blown by excessive preceding dithering and would've been better left ambiguous. Too many assertions are tendentious and weak: "a meaningless life meant a meaningless death" is feebly proffered and immediately retracted. I guess it sounded too good to be killed.
I did enjoy this one specific observation (leaving aside its crass inaccuracy):
The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not.
The other two involve keeping the sabbath and honouring one's forebears. Arguably only the latter has a liveness aspect and the rest are safety properties.
Prose was far more forgiving of Akbar's structure and writing, positing "we have probably not been reading Martyr! for its mysteries and its plot [...] but rather for the immersion in his enjoyably hyperactive sensibility." Goodreads. I'm still waiting to extend the addiction lit canon beyond Trainspotting and White Out. Humour is key.
