Martyr!
October 8, 2025 — Kaveh Akbar
Review
For a few weeks, maybe months, I have been going back and forth on a piece about purpose. Purpose in the Big sense, the moral and lifelong sense, having some sort of overarching goal either for your life or for a chapter of your life. It started even before then as a germ in a doctor’s office, when a doctor said, “you seem like a very determined person,” in response to something that probably should have raised clinical questions, not praise of virtue. Over the weekend, I was in a quasi-rural Philadelphia town, having been to a cocktail party and arrived back to my hotel in that mix of gloomy and retrospective self-examination that tends to follow me home from social events. I started back on the purpose piece, and around 2am shut my iPad and tossed it into my bad deciding there was no purpose in it.
In the days since, I’ve finished Kaveh Akbar’s 2024 Martyr!. The big yellow book has been on my list since its release, but even after a friend handed me a copy, it sat on my bookshelf for several months. When she gave it to me, my friend described something like, “good but too navel-gazey for me. You’ll probably like it.” I thought about that comment when I finally picked it up from the shelf and started in, feeling a twinge somewhere in the back of my brain, that I should be annoyed or poked-at by that comment. As I read through the book and fell to passages like this:
“But see,” Cyrus smiled, “that’s a whole part of it too. How much of this whole thing is my ego? How much is it me wanting to matter more than other people? In life or in death?”(page 157)
I quite knew what she meant, and yes, I did like it. As it turns out, the person that’s spent the last several years reading books on ‘goodness’ and morality alongside things like Eduard Leve’s Suicide, is indeed a bit navel-gazey.
Akbar’s lead character, Cyrus Shams, is an orphaned man, thirty years old, rather aimlessly trapped in Northern Indiana. In recovery, he shifts from restaurant jobs to his AA meetings and then to his shared apartment, lingering with records and strange dates and the absurdity of his mother’s death, in the destruction-by-surface-to-air-missile of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes. What does it mean for his mother to have died for nothing? For the lasting legacy of this catastrophe (as called by the US) and murder (as called by Iran), to be little more than a few New York Times articles and an Iranian postage stamp? Alone, this would be enough to confuse a person for life, but add his immigration as a child to the very nation that murdered his mother, and to grow up there in the Midwest, in the years after 9/11?
It’s no surprise that we find Akbar’s protagonist in a state of unrest, fascinated by death, and clearly depressed. I am not sure the word “depression” appears in the text at all, if it does, it is infrequent. Yet, Shams’ depression and passive suicidality coat the pages.
“What about you though, Cyrus Shams?” Orkideh asked. “If you become a martyr, won’t you be hurting the people who love you?”(page 181)Cyrus nodded. “Of course,” he said, then after a beat, “but it’s hard to figure out if that hurt would be worse than the hurt of my being here.”
Orkideh shook her head. “It will be worse,” she said. “I promise. If you let yourself get a little older, you’ll understand that.”
Not long after, Cyrus describes, internally, his desire to vanish as though he never existed in the first place:
He wanted to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool. The marvel would be how little the water moved, how the deep seemed to gulp him whole without even opening its mouth.(page 208)
This deep longing that one might slip away without being noticed, that such an act would cause no injury, is the delight of the depressed person. It is a searching permission, but also a fantasy. The very shame and guilt that Cyrus thinks about in other places, and his fascination with martydom as purpose-in-death, is an acknowledgement that such a passing is not possible. The passage on page 181, where we can almost hear the whizzing sounds of his mind spiraling around the question of, ‘what’s worse, that I live and hurt the people I love for as long as I live, or that I hurt them just a little all at once, and they can safely forget me afterwards?’ is maybe the rawest of Cyrus’ navel-gazing, but it isn’t a question new to anyone that’s been deeply depressed before. It may in fact be so familiar as to seem cliché on the page, overly spiraling, and then a reader that’s had these thoughts before might feel a little secondhand embarrassment and empathy for Cyrus.
Another character in the book contemplates shame, so often a bulging root in depression’s tree:
When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.(page 64)
Shame is one of the most powerful unseen forces in culture, simultaneously engineered by it, and engineering the culture itself, in often vicious cycles. Cyrus’ character doesn’t spend a lot of time considering shame in an affirmative sense, but the evidence of it is present, possibly a survivor’s shame or, more connected to the text, a shame that comes from thinking his life should be more than it is, that his life should have some sort of meaning. Some sort of purpose.
In the closing lines of Notes on Suicide, Simon Critchley writes:
The topic of suicide immediately raises the following question: by virtue of what is or is not life meaningful? It might seem that if we cannot answer the question of life’s meaning, then it would be prudent, perhaps even necessary, to exit life for… whatever: God or the void or some mixture of the two. If we cannot find reasons to be, then perhaps it is better not to be. But that would be a huge mistake, a fatal misstep. The question of life’s meaning is an error and should simply be given up. The great revelation will never come. The clouds will never part with the promise of solvation and our minds will never stop rattling down through gutters of doubt, self-deceit, self-pity and guilt.(_Notes on Suicide_, page 91)
Cyrus’ Earth Martyrs book, which he is contemplating and drafting on-the-page as Akbar’s book progresses, contemplates not necessarily the meaning of life but whether death can be so meaningful as to define the life that came before it, orient the termination of it as an act of importance, and not an act of desperation. In my reading of the book, I do not find Akbar to address this conundrum directly. The driving dilemma that Cyrus works around somewhat evaporates, and (without spoiling), the ending chapters take a rather different turn, one more interested in the interweaving lives of the characters than the questions Cyrus spent the first third or so of the book gazing at. This is probably for the best, as the answer can’t be very interesting. Critchley frames the question as ‘life’s meaning,’ while Cyrus is interested in the meaning of death. Both of these are ricochets off of the core question: what gives meaning to life? Critchley’s view is top-down, the imagined answer could only be one life-defining event. Cyrus’ view is bottom-up, the imagined answer could only define the life left ended by the martydom. I can’t address more of Cyrus’ question and a possible answer he found without discussing spoilers to the story.
What I enjoy about the book is that, for a time, Cyrus found purpose in his exploration of martydom, and that clearly staved off the demons weighing burden of death against burden of life. His inquiry gave his life purpose, for a time. I think that is the best that we are able to come up with: meaning, for a time.
In my draft notes for the purpose piece, I outlined what I saw as the major purposes of my life up until now. I started typing this out in my gloomy post-cocktails hotel room because for the past few months, I’ve felt a complete loss of purpose. The problem with purpose as a life-orienting concept is that it must fit somewhere in the small window between achievable and dominating. In around 2017 or 2018, my goal was to have a job that (and I’m paraphrasing a British show from Aramando Iannucchi, here) would devour my eyes, stare out of them, and tell me what to do. That was my solution to emotional pain and loneliness (it is not a solution to either of those things). I abandoned that not long after, growing a little more secure in myself and a little more aware of what purpose could look like in one’s life. As in, not a carnivorous tumor, but as an orienting wind.
I have been thinking about purpose more, lately. It is not an easy thing to work in an organization that has suffered a hostile takeover, one in which the installed powers not only do not understand empathy or compassion, but in fact seem to thrive on perpetrating harm at scale. There is no other way to understand some of the events of the day, is there? There is no moral, ethical, or lawful explanation. How does one find purpose? At what point is mitigating harm no longer possible? My consternation is that for maybe the past 6 or 7 years, my orienting wind was all about obtaining the job I have now, so that I could make positive change, build programs, and help people at scale. It is a horrible thing to be within what feels like the dismantling of decades of work, far predating me. If purpose is sought, is ‘to repair, afterwards’ realistic, or sustaining? I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll write more about that sometime. But, back to Martyr!.
Akbar’s book is splendidly written, engaging, and thoughtful. The writing around the 12-step programs is so accurate that one can almost taste the burnt coffee and paper cups. I had to look up if Akbar was in recovery himself, or if, like me, he had been trucked to a few meetings as a child (and eventually, as a chaperone; it was the former). I also deeply appreciated the exploration of sexuality and relationships throughout. This is a title I’d recommend to anyone that enjoys literary fiction, especially those that explore different identities, merging experiences, and reflective texts. I’m glad I read it, and while I delayed reading it for so long, it’s finally reached me at the perfect time.
Notes
p29 - “I’m not uncomfortable sitting in uncertainty. I’m not groping desperately to resolve it. I got four DUIs in a month because I was certain I was in control. That’s what certainty did to me. It put me in jail for eighteen months.”
p64 - When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.
p76 - . . . But none of those deaths meant anything. I don’t think it’s crazy to want mine to. Or to study people whose deaths mattered, you know? People who at least tried to make their deaths mean something.
p113 - Cyrus believed a hyper-focus on occasions for gratitude would make his eventual death more poignant, more valuable. When a sad-sack who hated life killed themselves, what were they really giving up? The life they hated? Far more meaningful, thought Cyrus, to lift yourself out of a life you enjoyed—the tea still warm, the honey still sweet. That was real sacrifice. That meant something.
p157 - “But see,” Cyrus smiled, “that’s a whole part of it too. How much of this whole thing is my ego? How much is it me wanting to matter more than other people? In life or in death?”
p176 - This gesture, this possibility, had always struck Cyrus as particularly moving—an evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn’t in the room. That people found the surplus psychic bandwidth to consider—or even worry over—anyone else’s interior seemed a bit of an unheralded miracle.
p181 - “What about you though, Cyrus Shams?” Orkideh asked. “If you become a martyr, won’t you be hurting the people who love you?” ¶ Cyrus nodded. “Of course,” he said, then after a beat, “but it’s hard to figure out if that hurt would be worse than the hurt of my being here.” ¶ Orkideh shook her head. “It will be worse,” she said. “I promise. If you let yourself get a little older, you’ll understand that.”
p208 - He wanted to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool. The marvel would be how little the water moved, how the deep seemed to gulp him whole without even opening its mouth.
p209 - And more than that even, [Americans] seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.
p262 - “I wish it wasn’t so hard to be good,” I whispered, surprising myself, not even sure Leila could hear me. “I’m trying. I really am. I’m just exhausted.”
p285 - She said it in English. I woke up screaming. Fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell.
p303 - “You’re a human being, Cyrus,” Sang said, gently, “So was your mother. So am I. Not cartoon characters. There’s no pressure for us to be ethically pure, noble. Or, God forbid, aspirational. We’re people. We get mad, we get cowardly. Ugly. We self-obsess.”
p329 - Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband’s abuse, I have held the certainty of the damned, that sense of “everything is going to be just this, this misery forever, till I die.” An irrepressible inescapable horror stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that way. That even in Roya’s and my impossibly good moments, I instinctively knew to hold them, to store them inside myself like pockets of fat for the lean seasons ahead.