‘Kaveh Akbar’s martyr!

But, well, the one that today (this season) also occupies us was a finalist of the National Book Award, it was One of the ten best books of 2024 according to ‘The New York Times’, It is recommended by ‘blurbs’ from renowned colleagues (including them for me very respectable Michael Cunningham and Mary Karar to whom he joins without problems John Greenthat master of suffering ‘self-help’ for young adults), and has more than favorable reviews (some putting it at the height of ‘The Conjure of the fools’ by John Kennedy Toole).

And, of course, one immediately – but with some effort – can only evoke the Passenger Aleeluyistic That at some point Marisha Pessl and David Vann and Jonathan Safran Foer and Garth Risk Hallberg and Tristan Egolf woke up and can only ask what they will walk now. They continue publishing, of course.

And some among them (leaving aside some suicide to which they may resurrect and immortalize ‘post-mortem’) writing much better books than those so promoted in their beginnings. But, of course, Obama has abandoned them. And not to complain much no longer suffering too much: it is even worse in our language where – he excepts more or less honest or criminal exceptions – The culture of the book Ephemeral Phenomenon prevails more imposing over the long -distance phenomenal author.

In any case, now it is the turn of ‘martyr!’ of Kaveh Akbar. And the previous paragraph was, sorry, to justify a certain initial prejudice before its’ magnum debut. Because, in addition, Akbar seems to make ‘check’ in all lockers: He was born in Tehran in 1989 (‘But’ his family moved to New Jersey when he was two years old), photography as an exotic-elegant, comes from poetry (where he has been very laureate) and ‘also’ of the academic world, publishes in ‘The New Yorker’ and is editor-to-finder of a highly respected publication: ‘Divedapper’, and was alcoholic and lived to tell and write it and expose it. And – this ‘also’ plays in his favor – is more than probable that Donald Trump will never fall in love.

That is: Akbar, with ‘martyr!’, Was immediately beatified and immediately canonized. What remains to be discerned, then, is if ‘martyr!’ It is a miracle. And it is not, of course. ‘Martyr!’ It is barely a very good novel that —’check ‘again— It has the great cunning of with/melt what is now known as ‘trauma-porn’ (The ‘so little life’ of Hanya Yanagihara to cry on Tiktok is probably the flagship of the subgenre closely followed by the ‘normal people’ of Sally Rooney and all of the aforementioned John Green and so many epigons of the epigons of the Auto-fiction testimony where the great challenge is to defeat in the contest of who is larger and more adaptable to Netflix series) with the calamic picaresque of a descendant of the ‘candide’ of Voltaire and both antihero model 18th century/19th century.

Add to this philosophical flashes of Robert M. hallucinogenic follies of the recently deceased Tom Robbins or Maruki Murakami, and a touch of realistic-magical geo-political orientalism ‘for export/import’ by Salman Rushdie.

Nothing new, very good. All this – in often formidable sentences, sometimes somewhat is/forced in its almost compulsive need to dazzle – to tell, in 2017, the thirty -year -old but such teenage wolf Cyrus shams. An ever emptying bottles and drug taster whose mother died in a bizarre and politicized plane crash. And who, without a map or direction, thinks that poetry (and, perhaps with prelude to his suicide, the writing of a book about martyrs including Juana de Arco and Malcolm X and Bobby Sands and the one who planted in front of the war tank in the Plaza de Tiananmen) can not only save but give meaning and beauty and rhyme to such a bad existence.

AND There is an defeated father and languishing in a chickens And a portentous uncle and an imaginary brother and a homosexual lover and a agonizing ‘performer’ Iraní ‘à la’ Marina Abramović and a smooth Simpson and a rumi and even a first president who reminds a lot of whom he now commands for the second time. And above the plot and its constant events – which for the moment it seems an at night 1002.

The subject: the torture of dissociation and disorientation suffered by whom, Insomne ​​while sleepwalker, he doesn’t know where he came from Neither where he is or where he goes, but that is why not a minute still in body and soul and in mind. And it is a pleasure and a challenge to follow him – although he is a character who wants to be so dear, so dear, all the time, even in his miseries – until he reaches such an emotional end as, it usually happens, a bit too sentimental.

Thus, a very good novel that It would be even better if the winds were not proclaimed so much That it is a unique masterpiece while, of course, Obama is already looking, knowing that he will have candidates and suitors, another book not to fall in love but – it is not the same – to fall in love.