Today’s matchup is a pair of
debuts. Kaveh Akbar is a well-known poet making his debut as a novelist while Tony Tulathimutte whose story, “The feminist,” brought him some notoriety makes his book-length debut with a collection of linked stories.
Both books caught my attention before this year’s Tournament of Books (I’m apparently becoming increasingly plugged in to the world of front-list fiction), but only Martyr! made it to the top of the reading pile before the tournament.
Akbar’s novel is a somewhat quixotic novel about a failing writer who decides to write about martyrs and in the process finds himself engaging with a performance artist who has chosen to die in public. Akbar relies a bit much on coincidence for his plot, but his language and observations are brilliant.
Rejection tackles a subject close to my heart, especially as someone who as a young man suffered a great deal of rejection (I even wrote my own story on the subject). The initial story manages to do a great job of presenting a narrator whose lack of self-awareness is both comic and touching, but as the stories progress, I found that Tulathimutte’s reach exceeded his grasp and the final metafictional piece in the collection felt like a failure to me.
Both books are flawed, but I felt that Martyr! did more to overcome its flaws so it was my pick to advance.
My judgment on the judgment
While I disagreed with some of Jean Chen Ho’s reasoning in her decision, her final choice, matching my own, was clearly correct so I can’t complain too much.
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