Name: Lindsay's review of Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Item: Martyr!
Rating: 5
Author: Lindsay

Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. “The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.” —Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and Furies Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed. Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

A novel

Martyr!

sofia 🪆

“Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.”

surely there are better ways to expand your horizons

Jasper

That summer, Cyrus was also trying to expand his horizons by dating a Republican.

Noreen Farsai

"I was thinking last night, your project reminds me of all the great Persian motor art,” Orkideh said. “Do you know much about that”

"Nothing at all. Can you tell me about it?" Cyrus said. He felt he might explode with all the things he wanted to say to her, but he was also desperate for Orkideh to teach him, to sit at her feet and learn. Selfishly, he wanted to stay in the chair all day, all week, not let the line move. He wanted Orkideh all to himself

 "Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe--France, Italy, Belgium-and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in the palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirror, the shah's architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches." "Whoa." "I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred." She paused, took a little sip from her white mug of water, then continued: 

“It means, in my humble opinion, we got to cubism hundreds of years before Braque or Picasso or any European. That maybe we've been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures. At least for a time. No monolithically good Siegfried hero versus monolithically bad dragon." 

jay chen

IF THE MORTAL SIN OF THE SUICIDE IS GREED, TO HOARD STILLNESS and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself--which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

It feels like this giant sponge sucking away anything in the world that’s supposed to feel good

"Expendable" may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

It made sense, and then suddenly it didn’t. It held a shape and then suddenly it didn’t. Like boiling water poured into a cup then poured over his head. He felt scorched, confused, suddenly alive.

"I cry all the time," she continued, as if I wasn't even there. "I hate it. It embarrasses me. I am not fragile, but sometimes my body just cries and I can't help it. It's a betrayal. Like someone tickling you, you laugh even when you don't want to, even when it hurts. That's how I cry."

"...These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred."

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.

When Roya was lying there heaving on her mud, that pond mud, I wanted to strangle her. Not to hurt her exactly, but to make her feel afraid, afraid the way I felt afraid, or afraid the way I felt I should have felt afraid, the way I felt blocked from feeling.

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 Iragi 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.

So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions. The morality of almond milk. The ethics of yoga. The politics of sonnets. There was nothing in his life that wasn't contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called "late capitalism." He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.

He wanted to be on "the right side of history," whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history.

I am setting out to write a book of elegies for people I've never met. Yes, there is an unforgivable hubris in my imagining any part of their living, and presuming to write about it. There is also hubris in writing about anything else.

Nearby, a woman was lifting a long blunt to the lips of the copper bust of John F. Kennedy while a friend snapped a picture. Cyrus was trying to be better about noticing these moments, about feeling grateful for the texture and specificity they lent his life.

"Wait wait wait. I cannot continue this conversation with you if you're going to stand there quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates at me," Kareem said. "Look at yourself. Look at what's happening to you." 

Beethoven looked at his hand, which was growing paler and paler by the second. It was like someone in Photoshop was slowly sliding the brightness filter up.

"Damn," said Beethoven, his face going from basketball- leather brown to referee's-uniform white. "Shit. Shit."

I never really loved being alive. It's hard to get there without some sort of distance. Hard to describe the shape of a cloud from inside the cloud. Like how I would appreciate gravity more if I'd had trouble floating off in my teens.

Nothing else worked this way, insisting upon pretending. You didn't sit in front of a plate of rice, pantomiming swallowing in order to take the tiny grains into your stomach. Sleep alone demanded that embarrassing recital.

Cyrus was furious at himself for not having said something more cutting when he stood up than "bullshit cult of bullshit." He drove home thinking of better alternatives: limp-dicked Republican church, coven of racist crones. It was soothing, to stop time and rework memory, imagining through the thesaurus multiverse. Vapid temple of words. Scumbag Caesars vivisecting God.

"I've read your poems, Cyrus. I get that you're Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that's a part of you. But you've probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you've spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones? Do you see what I mean?"

Cyrus wanted to kick him in the face. For being racist. For being a little right.

"You're the most American kid I know. You taught Shane how to play Madden, how to torrent Marvel movies. You buy fucking vinyl records. We're having this conversation in Indiana, not Tehran."

Gabe was the only person in Cyrus's life, white or not, who spoke to him this way. There was something in it, a kind of old man punk "fuck-it"-ness Cyrus had long admired, even if it meant Gabe sometimes danced well past the third rail of political correctness. Still, however abstractly he envied Gabe's ability to speak unencumbered by the rhetorical hygienics du jour, in this specific instance, still harried from the episode with Dr. Monfort, Cyrus quickly grew flush with righteous fury.

Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest, through CVS handles of bourbon and little pink pills with G 31 written on their side.

Connie Meade

Mostly what Cyrus felt was empty. A crushing hollowness, which governed him. He should have died on the plane with his mother but he'd been left home. With his father now dead, Cyrus had no parents left to worry over him. What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people. 

Cyrus’ father, Ali, died from a sudden stroke at the start of Cyrus’ sophomore year in college. lt was quick, and while Cyrus was, on hearing the news, pulverized, it quickly became clear to him  that his father had been living only to ensure his son's safe passage to adulthood. 

Lindsay

such beautiful writing! grief was the recurring topic that gripped me to this book.

the narrative was hard to get used to at first (i got confused each chapter because they kept jumping across so many characters in the beginning? could be a me problem though)

but once it all came together eventually (for me it was when he visited the museum), the story fell into place. less messy, more settled

aemouh

such beautiful writing! grief was the recurring topic that gripped me to this book.
the narrative was hard to get used to at first (i got confused each chapter because they kept jumping across so many characters in the beginning? could be a me problem though)
but once it all came together eventually (for me it was when he visited the museum), the story fell into place. less messy, more settled

I hate writing reviews about books that are this good 

 this popular, because what on Earth do I say now? Of course, the book is good! Surprise!

When starting on my review, one of my favorite things to do is to skim through 

 quotes you can usually find at the start of any book. Here's one I found particularly conversation-sparking:

What an interesting concept, right? And one we bring up a lot in more than just literature. "the book that Akbar has been building up to most of his life". I haven't read anything else from Akbar (yet), but I think that notion is quite well connected to Cyrus as a character. It's his entire struggle: what is his life building up to? What is he leaving behind that will give it meaning? Worth?

 novel is mind-boggling. There is so much to unpack, so much to love. Every chapter feels like it's own universe of storytelling, and the story (the ending, my GOD) gives you even more to chew on. I don't even know where to begin with any of it, as there's not much I can say about the story without spoiling . . .  everything.

I do feel like there are some smaller details - some bigger discoveries, even - that I've missed after this first read, especially with the ending. No doubt, I'll be rereading this very soon to explore it again.

smile??

I hate writing reviews about books that are this good and this popular, because what on Earth do I say now? Of course, the book is good! Surprise!

When starting on my review, one of my favorite things to do is to skim through Praise quotes you can usually find at the start of any book. Here's one I found particularly conversation-sparking:

"A deep-feeling, beautifully bruised debut novel . . . Martyr! reads like the book that Akbar has been building up to most of his life"

- San Francisco Chronicle

What an interesting concept, right? And one we bring up a lot in more than just literature. "the book that Akbar has been building up to most of his life". I haven't read anything else from Akbar (yet), but I think that notion is quite well connected to Cyrus as a character. It's his entire struggle: what is his life building up to? What is he leaving behind that will give it meaning? Worth?

Plus, to think that this is his debut novel is mind-boggling. There is so much to unpack, so much to love. Every chapter feels like it's own universe of storytelling, and the story (the ending, my GOD) gives you even more to chew on. I don't even know where to begin with any of it, as there's not much I can say about the story without spoiling . . .  everything.

I do feel like there are some smaller details - some bigger discoveries, even - that I've missed after this first read, especially with the ending. No doubt, I'll be rereading this very soon to explore it again.

10/10

it started good, ended flop. i’m sorry, it was a flop. it’s hard for me to read it towards the end. a cheater and abandoner. it’s just freaking weird when the main character prayed then kissed a guy. like bro?? i mean i know this is a queer book, but hello??? there’s a lot of Muslim stories were mentioned that i felt off, idk maybe it was Shia idk. and they are all just selfish. I’M SORRY TO ALI SHAMS.

Sumayya Tsabitah

A little slow to get into but my god, when it picks up it PICKS up. I’m still not sure I fully comprehend the whole thing, but it’s definitely a novel I’ll be thinking about for some time. I understand all the hype. I kind of wish I was more interested when I first started so that finishing it felt less like a loss. 

soph 

a really fun and interesting thought process on identity and the corresponding relationship with death as a result of one’s generational histories. more of a character study than anything, bc i wouldn’t say that much actually happens in the book haha but a really expansive and creative way of doing so! loved the lisa simpson chapter lmaoooo. could kinda see the reveal coming but it still made my jaw drop, which i think is the perfect way to do a reveal hehe also love this kind of #queer representation. overall a v enjoyable and rewarding experience! i also liked the narrator — they had a particular cadence to their reading that i didn’t expect but ended up really appreciating!!

lucia

PERFECT. PERFECTION! perfect in every language in every timeline in every universe

Nicole Grace

a uniquely original novel with beautiful poetry and prose. the ending felt like a bit of a stretch but not in a way that completely bothered me. the explorations of parenthood, religion, and artistic process I found particularly profound. 

Mic Carter

rain/anagha

I was really excited for this book and then it felt like too much? Very original but a little reaching?

Sarah Wilson

I liked the writing style of this book more than its main character. I found it hard sometimes to feel empathy for him.

Almost all of the Farsi words written in English letters, were completely wrong. Which was very annoying to me.

The character of Roya was an interesting character.

Yega

I liked the writing style of this book more than its main character. I found it hard sometimes to feel empathy for him.

Almost all of the Farsi words written in English letters, were completely wrong. Which was very annoying to me.

The character of Roya was an interesting character.

dream-like reflections on addiction, death/dying, grief/memory, language/art-making, goodness, & survival. akbar's gift is in rendering something real from what is essentially a constellation of images/snippets of narrative, tangible not in the way of lineation but in the way of feeling (more evidence that only poets should be writing novels). not the perfect novel by any means; it falters at several points in retaining momentum, especially at the beginning, & there are certain chapters that I would have edited out entirely. anyways reading martyr! while being sick out of my mind is like oh wow, life can truly be stranger than fiction but also nothing I am/has happened to me is exceptional actually

biddy

This was the most gorgeous book. It took me a while to get through because I felt I needed to be in the right mindset to read each time I picked it up and I’m so glad I properly savored it. Akbar is funny and brutally honest and so deeply poetic. It’s funny to me that there’s a Clarice Lispector quote in the back because he reminded me so much of her own narratives. I can’t wait to reread this book and buy my own copy so I can highlight my favorite pieces. I was really pleased with the ending and felt like it wrapped up nicely as well as remained true to itself the entire book. 

Lily Dendy

Really worked for me—prose, composition, the everything-else of it. Wish I could read a thousand more books like this but that wouldn’t be possible because this novel is so singular.

A book with an ambiguous ending! Made me google how others interpreted it. 

This book made me think so much, not a bad ending either. 

Marie 🌊

A book with an ambiguous ending! Made me google how others interpreted it. 

This book made me think so much, not a bad ending either. 



this is so good!!!! everyone should read this!! the prose is beautiful, and you can really tell the author is a poet. the whole story was gorgeous and complex and you end up loving all the characters so much. I’ve been thinking about this for days ever since I’ve finished, just sitting with the story. I would highly recommend!

fris🐝

Sam Sontag

Kaarthik sekar 

I humbly take back whatever ill I had thought about this book, whatever I had commented about it. I was wrong.

This, in essence, is actually, a really good book. Once you navigate towards the waves and just let yourself be, you see where it takes you, and while not completely surprised by it (quite predictable infact), you cease to find fault in it for every line has the ability to evoke something within you. 

So yes, while it wasnt the best for me, this is infact a good read. 

diya

I humbly take back whatever ill I had thought about this book, whatever I had commented about it. I was wrong.

This, in essence, is actually, a really good book. Once you navigate towards the waves and just let yourself be, you see where it takes you, and while not completely surprised by it (quite predictable infact), you cease to find fault in it for every line has the ability to evoke something within you. 

So yes, while it wasnt the best for me, this is infact a good read. 

“Cryus’ foot pounded. [...] In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured by not an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”

“No separation anymore: not music or country or clothes. Not fear. Not even history.”

“But I did know real, deep joy. [...] Tragedies are relentless. Nobody could ask for more than what I’ve had.”

“Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.”

better than the first time. a letter to allowing yourself to live and be loved. a demand to be “forgiven.” a demand to the universe. will cherish and stay with me forever

shen

reread (2025)

“Cryus’ foot pounded. [...] In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured by not an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”

/

“No separation anymore: not music or country or clothes. Not fear. Not even history.”

/

“But I did know real, deep joy. [...] Tragedies are relentless. Nobody could ask for more than what I’ve had.”

/

“Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.”

better than the first time. a letter to allowing yourself to live and be loved. a demand to be “forgiven.” a demand to the universe. will cherish and stay with me forever

Felt slow at times, but ended well. Made me feel more alive while reading.

Sarah E

a stunning masterpiece that left me full of wonder and ache—and painfully grateful for it all. long live the Poets 

petrina

It is not surprising how popular and successful this novel had been when it is one of the most poignant depictions of loss and the search of identity (and the mental anguish this could cause) for the modern generations. It is a book that - much like life - deals with a multititude of themes, albeit the two mentioned above being leading, which gives it its sense of layerness and mastery of narration. And while I found the ending a little weaker than than the first 80% or so, I still find the work impactful as a whole.

Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty- seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do- over. Clarification.

The whiskey did, for him, what a bedside table did for normal people— it was always at the head of his mattress, holding what was essential to him in place. It lifted him daily from the same sleep it eventually set him into.

Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated.

It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision. This job or that job, this life or that. Not drinking was Herculean enough on its own.

“I took a shower and passed out. I remained. But so did the dread. I thought getting sober would help, that came later. Recovery. And it did, in its way. Certainly it made me less a burden to the people around me, created less dread in them. But it’s still in me, that doom organ.” He pointed again at his neck. “It’s in my throat, throbbing all day every day. And recovery, friends, art— that shit just numbs it for a second. What’s that word you used?”

“Right, palliative, yeah. All that stuff is palliative. It stills the suffering, but it doesn’t send it away.”

“Recovery is made of words, and words have all these rules. How can anything so limited touch something as big as whatever the fuck a ‘Higher Power’ is? How can it get rid of the big ball of rot inside me? It feels like this giant sponge sucking away anything in the world that’s supposed to feel good. What words can touch that?”

The big pathological sad. Whether I’m actually thinking about it or not. It’s like a giant bowling ball on the bed, everything kind of rolls into it.”

For as long as he could remember, Cyrus had thought it unimaginably strange, the body’s need to recharge nightly. The way sleep happened not as a fact like swallowing or using the bathroom, but as a faith. People pretended to be asleep, trusting eventually their pretending would morph into the real thing. It was a lie you practiced nightly— or, if not a lie, at least a performance. And while performance did not necessarily void sincerity, it certainly changed it. The speech you practiced in front of the mirror was always different than the one you ended up giving.

Nothing else worked this way, insisting upon pretending. You didn’t sit in front of a plate of rice, pantomiming swallowing in order to take the tiny grains into your stomach. Sleep alone demanded that embarrassing recital.

 if to incentivize the whole ordeal, the body offered you dreams. In exchange for a third of your living, you were offered sprawling feasts, exotic adventures, beautiful lovers, wings. Or at least the promise of them, made only slightly less intoxicating by the curious threat of nightmare. How sometimes, at random, your mind would decide to reduce you to a whimper, or a gasp, in the night.

These terms were non- negotiable, and if you didn’t agree you went mad, or you got sick, or you died. Cyrus had read about it over and over. After just twenty- four hours without sleep, you lost coordination and short- term memory. After forty- eight hours, your blood sugar spiraled, your heart began to beat irregularly.

 was hard for Cyrus not to see waking as the enemy. The way it corroded your power to exist— to live and think with acuity— until you finally submitted. Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote. What if everyone was more conscious of this? How would it charge, make more urgent, their living? “I have been poisoned, I have only sixteen hours until I succumb.”

Roya’s mother had spoiled her children the way grandparents spoiled their grandchildren. Roya thought she’d spoil a child the way rain spoiled a drive.

Roya, only ten, already knew she wouldn’t have a future like her mother’s. She didn’t know what kind of future she wanted for herself, but when she tried to imagine it, there were no dining tables, no kitchens either. Mostly there was open space, freedom and passion, heat obscuring everything like a candle flame smocking its wick.

In Cyrus’s active addiction it had taken dread and doom bringing him to his knees, or euphoric physical ecstasy elevating him half- literally out of his body— to break through his dense numb fugue. In sobriety, he still sometimes erroneously expected this of the universe— a stark shock of embodied rapture, the angel dropping from the sky to smack him with clarity’s two- by- four. Cyrus was beginning to realize that the world didn’t actually work this way, that sometimes epiphany was as subtle as a friend showing you something they saw on Twitter.

For all his oscillating between self- loathing and self- pity, Cyrus always seemed sincerely joyful at his friends’ most banal successes. Even then.

she saw a private nobility about feet, the way, like the body’s most intimate parts, they mostly stayed hidden from the world. But unlike those tucked away bits, she’d said, feet were constantly performing thankless and often demeaning work while mostly the other parts drowsed, swaddled in nylon or cotton or lace. Even wearing something open like sandals or heels, the soles of one’s feet were concealed, secretly pressing themselves into and pushing back against the world, as if to halt its ever- encroaching advance.

What was there to complain about? A murdered wife? A sore back? The wrong grade copper? Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

When a sad- sack who hated life killed themselves, what were they really giving up? The life they hated?

He had a decent life, didn’t need to work too hard to stay where he was. His rent was cheap, he had friends, there were books he was excited to read. But some days, that all felt so abstract as to become totally meaningless. Cyrus often wept for no reason, bit his thumbs till they bled. Some nights he’d lie awake till morning, frightening sleep away with the desperation of his wanting it.

Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?

And then, if the girl herself was rubbled by an errant mortar shell, her eyes full of tears and aimed in their final living moment at that flower, which would weigh more on the cosmic scales: a tear of gratitude at the great beauty of a flower lifting through ash, or a tear of delirious rage?

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life. Even the platitudes offered after a tragedy— a divorce, a dead pet— seemed built around the expectation that gratitude was a base level to which you returned after passing through some requisite interval of grief: “In time, you’ll remember only the joy.” People really said that, people who, like Cyrus, could reasonably expect that sufficient training of the spirit would reveal a near- infinite supply of gratitudes hidden in every leaf and sound and mortarless sky.

Nothing could stop us from our descending, our legs were running the sort of running that wasn’t even running anymore just desperately trying to keep up with the rushing world, the speed of the ground moving under us and only our clumsy skinny legs, idiot technologies, to keep us from crumbling in a heap,

Sometimes I heard my mother crying, my father scolding her to stop. But I thought it lucky, the clarity of tears. Instead of the loose riot of confusion and dread webbed up in my chest, in my head, probably wearing lesions into my gut and brain.

But he’d never been one to let his beliefs get in the way of a buzz,

Cyrus wondered about how much of his living he owed to other people’s assumptions of his us- ness.

I knew wives then who couldn’t use the bathroom without first asking their husband’s permission. My marriage with Ali was never one of those, but just being perceived, all the time being perceived, was itself exhausting.

They found it impossible to describe their relationship to others without over- or underselling the kind of intimacy they shared. So they didn’t try.

Cyrus paused for a second. He felt a flash of familiar shame— his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. He realized he was perhaps doing what Sad James had once called The Thing, the overliking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering.

It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.

Cyrus wondered sometimes how much ideas of leadership in the West (a term he was also dubious of— west of what? The earth is a sphere where every spot is west of every other— calling America “the west” and Iran “the Middle East” placed the center squarely in Europe) had to do with notions of an infallible Christian God.

the sound of a jazz singer’s voice cracking on a record was the sound of an emotional event too urgent for the medium assigned to record it

And even those were written after he got sober, when poetry simply became a place to put his physical body, something he could do for a few hours without worrying about accidentally killing himself. That was poetry then, a two- by- four floating in the ocean. When Cyrus wrapped himself around it, he could just barely keep his head above waves.

This brought in the self- loathing, the exasperation with living. Cyrus knew his pragmatic brain would click into fix- it mode soon, but he first allowed himself a few sumptuous instants of self- pity. He wanted, acutely in that moment, to be not- alive. Not to be dead, not to kill himself, but to have the burden of living lifted from his shoulders.

(Zee had joked that a hotel’s fanciness was directly proportional to how long it took you to figure out how to turn on the showerhead)

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself— which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. 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.

She studied my face and I studied hers. She had really been in love with me once, and I had really loved watching her love me. Which sounds terrible, but it’s not. It’s easy to resent those who love you. Those who are over eager with their affection. Too performative. But I loved how Sang loved me, easily, like it was its own soul in her chest, pumping that love through her, animating her as naturally as blood. Even if I didn’t have that for her. We both knew it all along, all those years. Me pathologically waiting for her to fall asleep before coming to bed. Sang hoping something would shift, knowing it wouldn’t. We were both mostly fine with it, happy enough. Happy winding between museums, her kids’ graduations, art openings, fancy dinners. Happy enough, until we weren’t.

Lindsay &
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

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Lindsay &Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

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Lindsay &
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar