“An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.”
Published: 2024
Hit play, it’s good reading music and relevant:
I didn’t know anything about Kaveh Akbar when I picked this up – the owner of one of my favourite bookstores said she was sure it would be something I’d like. She was absolutely right. So much of this felt like Akbar was seeing into my own head.
The book is about Cyrus Shams, a recovering alcoholic whose parents died – his mother when he was very young, his father when he was in college. His dad moved from Iran to Indiana when Cyrus was a child. Now that he’s in recovery, he’s questioning the meaning of life and death, and wants to write a book about people whose death had meaning. He travels to Brooklyn to interview a dying artist and winds up getting more than he expected.
It shifts perspective, from Cyrus to his relatives (living and dead), to strange dreamlike conversations that he imagines to try to help him get to sleep. There’s lots of references to music and how it shapes experience (the piece you’re listening to right now is referenced a few times).
It’s weird and feels a little gimmicky, until suddenly it snaps into place, to echo and circle back on itself. By the end of it I felt like something magic had happened, and I spent an hour flipping back through the story to connect the dots.
Akbar’s a poet by reputation, and that doesn’t always translate well into longer-form stuff, but this is genius:
Every night he would lie awake, endlessly reprocessing the day’s events, discovering in these rehashings slights and conversational missteps that hadn’t in the moment occurred to him to worry about. He’d work to try to convince himself these affronts were imagined, then his brain would offer its rebuttal: they were real, and each person he’d maligned would remember it forever-the friend whose new sneakers Cyrus hadn’t noticed, the teacher whose hello he’d accidentally ignored. The cycle repeated endlessly.
If you know you know. Some of us live like this even as grown-ass adults.
There’s so much more. Cyrus’ addiction and sobriety is central to the book, and Akbar is clearly being autobiographical about a lot of the addiction stuff. Like this (emphasis mine):
Beautiful terrible, how sobriety disabuses you of the sense of your having been a gloriously misunderstood scumbag prince shuffling between this or that narcotic crown. The superficial details may change-it wasn’t a truck, it was a business; it wasn’t a sweetheart, it was a family-but the algorithm is inexorable. A drug works till it doesn’t.
Dependence grows until it eclipses everything else in the addict’s life.
Rotten sun. Joy withers in the absence of light. Passion, jobs, freedom, family. We all have the snorting-spilled-coke-off-bathroom-tile stories. That stuff is only interesting to those blessed with a rare cosmic remove from knowing actual addicts. Active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness. The story is what comes after.
It’s not just the intimately personal that’s explored that way either. He explores the immigrant experience, Middle Eastern history (and the nomenclature of the geography itself), and so much more:
It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn’t come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.
It’s hard to limit the amount of copy-and-paste here. The book blends fully-developed characters with a compelling story, drama and humour, told with unforgettable sentences. It’s a sure addition to many ‘…of the year’ lists.
Here’s a piece in the NYT (gift link) about him and the process of the book. It includes audio of him reading three of his poems, which I found more impactful than reading them.