Book Club
By Hana Zittel
Published Issue 133, January 2025
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (2024)
On July 3 1988, Iran Air Flight 655, a plane filled with 290 occupants heading from Tehran to Dubai, was shot down by the USS Vincennes, a United States Naval ship. All occupants on board were immediately killed. Poet Kaveh Akbar’s first novel’s trajectory starts here. Roya Shams, mother of Cyrus Shams, was heading to Dubai that day to visit her brother, a man shattered from the trauma he faced on the battlefield of the Iran-Iraq War. The lives of Cyrus and his father, Ali, crumbled after Roya died. Left alone to take care of a small baby, Ali made the decision to uproot their life in Iran, seizing an opportunity to work on a chicken farm in Indiana.
Plagued by near constant insomnia and parentless after his father died when he started college, Cyrus, now in his late 20s, is a self-proclaimed poet (without much work to show for it) and in recovery from addiction to both alcohol and drugs. His day job as a medical actor, playing sick and terminally ill patients for medical students to practice delivering bad news and diagnoses, leaves him thinking of death all day long. Cyrus’ thoughts of dying and considerations of suicide have left him questioning what it means for a death to be significant, to mean something. His mother’s death was so instant, so random and meaningless, that he needs to know what the opposite could be. At an open mic, his friend mentions a new art exhibit opening in Brooklyn. An Iranian woman dying of breast cancer is spending her final days in the museum, talking to anyone about anything they want. Cyrus is persuaded to go, to ask her about death, meaning and martyrdom.
Akbar’s novel is fluid, inventive and marked with elegant character development. Cyrus and his family are all full, developed, and complex characters with secrets and hidden pasts set against unimaginable tragedy and trauma. One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2024, Kaveh Akbar’s first journey into the novel format is a captivating, twisting and truly an original story. He is the author and editor of many other poetry collections including 2021’s Pilgrim Bell, a finalist for both the Forward Prize for Best Collection and Maya Angelou Book Award.
Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, Translated by Helge Dascher and Karen Houle (2024)
“I had never really erotized men either. I’d fall for them the way you fall for a sofa in a Nordic furniture catalogue …”
Julie Delporte’s latest graphic novel is a beautiful meditation on queerness, trauma, sex and self. Delporte came out at 35 as she began to understand her attraction to women, and how her previous attitude and lack of enjoyment of sex was due to conformity to heteronormative standards. Through this acceptance of her sexuality, she altered her views on how she should behave, dress and move through the world, making her way to an authentic existence.
Drawn with soft colored pencil, Delporte’s illustrations feel light and dreamlike, like we are meandering through her thoughts and inner world. Matched with penciled text in perfect, hand-drawn cursive, Portrait of a Body is as intimate visually as it is in story. An honest and raw memoir, Portrait of a Body is an openhearted coming out story and unfiltered look at the quest for one’s true self.
Hana Zittel is a librarian at the Denver Public Library in addition to being a librarian at the Denver Zine Librarian. She grew up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado and pretty much just likes being outside with her pup when she has some free time, and reading, that might have been assumed though.
Check out Hana’s December Book Club in case you missed it, or head to our Explore section to see more of her past reviews.