{"id":10836,"date":"2025-02-26T15:58:03","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T15:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=10836"},"modified":"2025-02-26T16:02:27","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T16:02:27","slug":"martyr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/26\/martyr\/","title":{"rendered":"Martyr!"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Equation of Grace<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Poet Kaveh Akbar\u2019s first novel is a touching, funny, and profound exploration of getting what we need but don\u2019t deserve.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Sarah Clark<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Martyr!<\/em> is one the best books I\u2019ve read in a long time. Many books written in the last fifty years or so, even the good ones, are marred by facile character \u201cdevelopment,\u201d by frankly bad writing, or by chronological snobbery, rising to a sense that the author thinks, at least on some level, that the present moment towers above all past moments, and we have nowhere to go but up. Martyr!<\/em>, on the other hand, is one of those books that transcends its present moment, that touches something of the common humanity that allows us lonely human individuals to see that despite the distances that lie between us, it is possible not to be alone. It\u2019s not a perfect book, but if it were perfect, it would be less fully human than it is. Its excellence is of the kind that matters.<\/p>

Kaveh Akbar signed my copy for me before I read it, and he also wrote, \u201cMay you walk in wonder.\u201d It seemed an odd juxtaposition with the violently yellow cover and the title: Martyr!<\/em> with an exclamation point. Still, we ought to walk through this world in wonder, even if very few of us succeed at doing so for any sustained period. Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek<\/em> that if you will but wait quietly, \u201cNot only does something come\u2026 but it pours over you like a waterfall, like a tidal wave.\u201d Yet I often find myself too mired in sheer everydayness to find that quiet place to wait, too stuck in Eliot\u2019s \u201ctwittering world\u201d to find the darkness. Despite our nearly obverse externals, I have this distractedness in common with the protagonist of Martyr!<\/em>, Cyrus Shams. We also share a belief in a God who sometimes feels unutterably far away.<\/p>

Martyr!<\/em> begins with a spark. We meet Cyrus lying on a mattress on the floor, somewhere between stoned and sober, in a room \u201cthat smelled like piss and Febreze.\u201d And there, for a moment, a heartbeat, God reveals himself to Cyrus. And then the moment passes. On the next page, we start with Chapter One, two years later, with the now-sober Cyrus on his way to work, where he plays the part of a dying person (or, as Cyrus likes to think of it, one \u201cof those who will perish\u201d) so medical students can practice giving out bad news. His roommate, the Polish-Egyptian Zee, is concerned this morbid job isn\u2019t good for Cyrus. Zee is probably right.<\/p>

As the novel unfolds, we learn more about Cyrus and his life. The first few chapters reveal that he is the son of an Iranian immigrant, now deceased, named Ali, and a mother he has never known. Roya Shams was on her way to visit her brother in Dubai when her Iranian commercial flight was inadvertently or accidentally or maybe sort of on purpose shot down by an American aircraft carrier, killing all aboard. \u201cJust shot out of the sky. Like a goose,\u201d Ali reflects in a flashback.<\/p>

We also learn that Cyrus is a poet, a pretty good one, and that he thinks a lot about dying. His father died while he was a sophomore in college, and he doesn\u2019t know his family back in Iran. He is alone in the world (specifically Indiana), and he carries within himself an eternal, unshakable sense of dread. Where alcohol had occasionally given him the clarity to see \u201clife as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you,\u201d he\u2019s now sober but floundering, struggling to feel anything good, or to feel anything at all. He\u2019s angry and suffering and confused. Still, Cyrus holds onto the idea that he wants his life\u2014and his death\u2014to be significant, not just \u201ca rounding error\u201d like his mother\u2019s senseless murder. He decides to write about martyrs: people, as he defines it, who have found a way to make their deaths matter.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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People in this story do terrible, inexcusable things that they can never make right. Other people suffer greatly on account on them.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Akbar\u2019s skill as a writer brings Cyrus Shams to life. Weaving between the inside and outside of Cyrus\u2019s head, to other narrators and other times, Akbar makes the world of his characters, their lives, and especially their pain, vividly real. I resonated with Ali\u2019s suffering, as he deals with grief and a baby who barely sleeps, all alone. I raged with Cyrus at a world full of nothing but words that fail to make the pain go away. But I equally felt the moments of hope and humor, as when Cyrus\u2019s AA sponsor Gabe tells him, \u201cThere\u2019s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more,\u201d and Cyrus gets it, replying, \u201cGood person drag.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

I don\u2019t want to give any more details here, because I don\u2019t want to spoil this book for you. I want you to read it, to follow along with the reveal of the story as it moves backwards and forwards in time, laying the groundwork for what is to come. Later in the story, we go with Cyrus to meet the Iranian-American artist Orkideh, who is dying of cancer and hosts a performance art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum so people can talk to her while she\u2019s dying. Much later, Orkideh reflects,<\/p>

What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you\u2019ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you\u2019ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you\u2019ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There\u2019s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x<\/em> good, receive y<\/em> reward. Grace doesn\u2019t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.<\/h2>

Martyr!<\/em>, fundamentally, is a story about grace. It\u2019s about the real suffering of being human, and about getting what we don\u2019t deserve. People in this story do terrible, inexcusable things that they can never make right. Other people suffer greatly on account on them. It\u2019s about dying and learning to live, and it ends with a miracle. That miracle is forgiveness. A waterfall. A tidal wave. We forget, sometimes, that what we do not deserve is enough to make us whole.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Sarah Clark<\/strong> lives in New Hampshire with her husband and daughter. She is a founding editor of Fare Forward<\/em> and the current editor-in-chief, and she owns Scale House Print Shop<\/a>, a letterpress printing studio. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2011 and received an MAR in Religion & Literature from Yale Divinity School in 2022.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Martyr! <\/strong>was published by Knopf on January 23, 2024. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here<\/a>.
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Poet Kaveh Akbar\u2019s first novel is a touching, funny, and profound exploration of getting what we need but don\u2019t deserve. 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