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Review

Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr! arrives with the kind of polyphonic ambition that announces a poet’s entrance into prose determined to dismantle the architecture of meaning itself. The book does not simply tell a story about a grieving Iranian-American man chasing a fantasy of sacrificial death; it systematically strips that fantasy down to its load-bearing ego and then asks what, if anything, remains when the scaffolding of symbol and martyrdom collapses. Akbar’s wager is that grace lives on the far side of that collapse—not as a doctrine, not as a redemption narrative, but as a room one steps into, an ordinary presence already there. That wager is the novel’s true subject, and it is both its most audacious gift and the point at which Martyr! most risks dissolving its own hard-won tensions into a lyric sublime.

The book’s four-register structure—present-day third person tracking Cyrus Shams through 2017 Indiana and Brooklyn, typographically distinct poems and manifestos from his working Book of Martyrs, historical flashbacks to his parents and uncle across decades and continents, and surreal dream dialogues with the dead—mirrors the diasporic mind’s habit of holding incompatible truths without synthesis. Cyrus is a recovering alcoholic, a medical actor paid to perform dying bodies for trainee doctors, and a poet who has spent his adult life constructing a secular canon of “earth martyrs,” figures who died for other people rather than for gods or afterlife. The project is a disguised suicide note: he wants his own death to mean more than his life, convinced that the anonymous biological end of his father Ali and the apparent annihilation of his mother Roya on Iran Air Flight 655 demand a more dramatic exit. “I want my life—my death—to matter more than that,” he tells his AA sponsor Gabe. “I want to die. I think I always have.”

Gabe, a late-fifties playwriting professor who dismisses Cyrus’s “Persian higher power” as romantic schtick, forces the question: what does he actually want from his “unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated existence”? The answer, Cyrus admits in an AA share, is a “textureless middle” of sobriety that only finds relief in “rushing the cockpit”—the phrase for an impulsive cruelty he knows intimately. Akbar dramatizes addiction and the martyr-fantasy as parallel strategies, each a way of bypassing the mundane demands of living. The mortal sin of suicide, Cyrus’s manuscript declares, is greed—hoarding stillness for yourself while dispersing your riotous pain among survivors. The mortal sin of the martyr, then, 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.

This formulation sits inside Cyrus’s BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx, and Akbar never lets us forget that the book is literally staging its own argument. The poems to Bobby Sands, Hypatia, Qu Yuan, and Bhagat Singh are brief, elegant, and occasionally too efficient to earn their places; they function more as thematic markers than as fully inhabited elegies. Yet that thinness may be intentional—the manuscript is Cyrus’s working document, his ego in another costume, and its insufficiency becomes part of the plot. The novel’s richer historical material unfolds in the third-person flashbacks to 1973 Tehran, 1987–88 Iran, and a 1997 New York gallery, where the family’s inherited trauma is given texture the martyr-poems lack.

Those flashbacks are the book’s most emotionally unadorned passages. In them we meet Roya and her lover Leila, two women trapped in unhappy marriages, who kiss in a bazaar alley after Leila presses her ear to the asphalt “to hear the angels drumming.” Their secret affair culminates in a passport swap: Roya escapes Iran under Leila’s identity, and Leila boards Iran Air Flight 655 carrying Roya’s passport. On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes shoots the civilian plane out of the sky over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 aboard. The novel doesn’t aestheticize this atrocity; it quotes the Joint Chiefs of Staff euphemism directly: “There are no ‘flawless’ operations in combat—even when there is a successful outcome. But to say that there were mistakes made, says very little by itself.” That institutional language, placed as an epigraph to the novel’s most crucial chapter, stands in deliberate contrast to the plain speech Orkideh will later demand—and to the quiet devastation of Ali, who raises infant Cyrus alone in Fort Wayne on a breeder chicken farm, drinking gin, calling his shell-shocked brother-in-law Arash, and carrying a grief that science—the seahorse pregnancies, the nuclear furnace of the sun, the ancient Sumerian complaint about bad copper—cannot transmit to his son.

Arash Shirazi is the novel’s other martyr-image, a conscript forced to dress as one of the black-cloaked, flashlight-headed “angels” who rode horses among the dying on the Iran-Iraq War’s battlefields to keep soldiers from committing suicide. “Action will be judged according to intention,” his commander reminds him, and Arash becomes a living emblem of state-sanctioned martyrdom, a witness to desperate thirst and gurgled Ayat al-Kursi, a trauma that will later reduce him to a shaky Fort Wayne uncle sending 3 a.m. WhatsApp calls. Against Arash’s conscripted heroism, Roya’s escape looks morally ambiguous—she chose survival and queer love over national duty—and the novel refuses to declare who has the better claim. That refusal is one of its most mature gestures.

The story’s central movement pivots on Cyrus’s trip to Brooklyn to visit Orkideh, a legendary Iranian visual artist staging a terminal installation called DEATH-SPEAK, in which she sits in the Brooklyn Museum for four hours a day, dying of cancer, speaking plainly with anyone who visits. Cyrus hopes to interview her for his Book of Martyrs; he recognizes her as “exactly what I need,” a dying body whose meaning might finally align with his search. But Orkideh dismantles his project from the first conversation. She coins the phrase “earth martyrs”—“people who die for other people. Not dying for glory or an impressable God”—but she refuses to accept his awed projections. She asks simply to be friends. And in a later monologue, she delivers the novel’s central aesthetic claim:

For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s.

This is not decoration; it is survival infrastructure, the way we outsource cognition to intersubjective space. Orkideh quotes the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad—“I am gone, my heart is filled of sorrow— O Muslims, I am sad tonight”—as the touchstone of Death-Speak: plain, urgent, not artifice. The novel’s most radical move is that it doesn’t let this claim remain abstract. It makes Orkideh be Roya Shams. The dying artist whose wisdom Cyrus has been absorbing is his mother, who recognized him in the museum line and asked her gallerist-ex-wife Sang Linh to find him. The revelation, delivered on a snowy Prospect Park bench, annihilates Cyrus’s foundational trauma: his mother did not die a martyr; she faked her death and lived three decades as a celebrated painter, while his aunt Leila, holding the wrong passport, burned in the sky.

The book’s final stretch attempts to stage what happens after the martyr-fantasy collapses. Cyrus reads Orkideh’s self-composed New York Times obituary, which ends with her own epitaphic line: “An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything. Orkideh, 2017.” Then he prays—without words—for “an end to the tyranny of all symbols, beginning with language.” Akbar writes the scene with the force of a writer who knows the paradox: the prayer is articulated in the very medium it wishes to escape. Cyrus “understood, with a clarity that had until that moment in his life eluded him, that he was not at all made for the world in which he lived, that art and writing had gotten him only trivially closer to compensating for that fundamental defectiveness, the way standing on a roof gets one only trivially closer to grabbing the moon.” That recognition, not resolution, is the book’s pivot out of the martyr-logic, and it is followed by the novel’s most extraordinary set piece: the apocalyptic Prospect Park sequence with Zee.

Zee Novak—Cyrus’s Polish-Egyptian roommate, drummer, barista, and platonic-intimate lover—has been the quiet counterweight throughout, refusing to romanticize Cyrus’s pain, insisting on everyday care. As they embrace in the park, the world transforms. Spring erupts through snow; the Brooklyn skyline blisters and re-forms; a herd of horses and a great cloaked rider pass; and Cyrus’s severed foot—the one he lost in a fentanyl-fueled axe accident in 2014—opens into a “swirling void, a cosmos of deep gravity and pale bones.” Zee tells him, “Underneath being-startled is the expectation of calm. I mean, a person gasps because the ease they were expecting was interrupted. I think probably your life hasn’t taught you to expect ease.” He adds: “Fuck hell. Fuck heaven too. Hell is a prison. All we do is build those on earth. No need to imagine more.” The apocalyptic pastoral externalizes the interior collapse of symbolism, and Cyrus’s step into a golden pool—narrated as “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it”—functions less as epiphany than as consent to a presence that was already there.

Structurally, this sequence takes immense risks. It flirts with dissolving the novel’s historical and political specificity into a kind of mystical transcendence, and some readers will feel that the downing of Flight 655, with its 290 dead, deserves a less sublimating treatment. Yet Akbar counters that risk with two deliberate moves. The first is the healed-femur parable, which Cyrus recalls earlier: an anthropologist argued that the first artifact of civilization was not a weapon but a human femur from Madagascar showing signs of healing from a bad fracture, meaning “some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound.” Civilization begins not with sacrifice, not with martyrdom, but with a fracture bound and food brought back. That empirical, pre-symbolic claim undergirds the entire climax—it is the reason grace can arrive as a room rather than a doctrine. The second countermove is the 1997 flashback that closes the narrative proper: Sang, her wife Roya, and her son Duy dismantling Orkideh’s third sellout show “Why We Put Mirrors in Birdcages,” three people in a gallery laughing at Roya’s terrible joke about a Cadillac car door. “Because when the world ends and it’s just us left to fend for ourselves, I can roll down the window when it gets hot!” The laughter is “good and full, where nothing could splinter us into shards.” Then the Clarice Lispector epigraph lands: “My God, I just remembered that we die. But—but me too?! Don’t forget that for now, it’s strawberry season.” The novel refuses its own tragic register and places the reader back in the body, in the season, in the imperative to notice the ordinary. That refusal is an argument, not an evasion.

Situating Martyr! within its lineages reveals just how many conversations Akbar has folded into a single book. The existentialist and absurdist traditions are most audible: Cyrus perceives a game “totally rigged against goodness,” a phrase that echoes Camus’s notion of the absurd revolt, and Zee’s dismissal of heaven and hell as prisons built on earth leans into a materialist refusal of afterlife architecture. The novel half-recalls Czesław Miłosz’s poem about archangels’ trumpets and locusts and horsemen, where those who demand cosmic drama are “disappointed”—a fragment that hangs over Cyrus’s own demand for a death more meaningful than death itself. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Bruegel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” are invoked explicitly; the expensive delicate ship that “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on” becomes a motif that asks whether suffering, even atrocity, ever truly registers in the indifferent machinery of the world. Akbar’s answer is both yes and not without care—the world keeps sailing, but someone can still feed you while your femur heals.

The book also positions itself within multiple Iranian and diasporic traditions. Farrokhzad’s plain lyric is not just quoted but enacted in Orkideh’s death-speech; the lineage of Saadat Hasan Manto—writing atrocity without catharsis—haunts the novel’s refusal of closure. Hafez appears in an interlude with “paradise as cash in hand,” and Rumi shows up in a dream performing to a hardcore crowd, his mysticism repurposed as a secular, irreverent presence. Du Bois’s double-consciousness surfaces in Cyrus’s sense of being a “dangerous Iranian”—the stereotype and the self-conception collapsing into each other—and the acknowledgment of Tommy Orange and Lauren Groff as influences places the novel in explicit conversation with contemporary literary fiction’s engagement with inherited trauma and addiction. Marina Abramović’s “The Artist Is Present” is the obvious foil for DEATH-SPEAK, but where Abramović’s work relied on the endurance of the performer’s body as spectacle, Orkideh’s terminal installation insists on mortality as the unspectacular condition of the work. “The artist is present” becomes “the artist is dying in front of you—and that is not a performance, it’s just what’s happening.”

Feminist and queer lines of thought run deeply here, though they are never announced as such. The novel’s most radical act is its centering of sick, dying, oxygen-cannulated, or “ugly” bodies as primary sites of knowledge. Orkideh’s emaciated frame, Cyrus’s phantom-limb foot, Zee’s depressive episodes—these are not metaphors for psychological states; they are the material conditions out of which wisdom is produced. Sang’s flashback, in which she, her wife Roya, and her son dismantle a sellout show, is a portrait of queer domestic and professional fulfillment that refuses the tragic arc. The novel insists that the healed femur, not the heroic death, is civilization’s first object, and that claim is also a feminist re-reading of history: caregiving precedes narrative, precedes monument, precedes martyrdom.

The book is not without its soft spots. The dream dialogues—Lisa Simpson interviewing Cyrus’s mother, Rumi smoking a cigarette with Ali, Orkideh walking a Trump-like “President Invective” through a mall—can feel like intellectual shortcuts, allowing the novel to offload thematic commentary into whimsy rather than letting it emerge from the central drama. Some of these sequences are genuinely funny and sharp, but they accumulate in a way that occasionally diffuses the emotional pressure building in the main narrative. The martyr poems themselves, for all their concision, sometimes read more as conceptual placeholders than as poems one would return to outside the novel’s architecture; the Qu Yuan and Bhagat Singh entries, in particular, risk reducing living political histories to lyrical gestures. And the novel’s climactic apocalyptic sequence, for all its verbal radiance, risks sentimentalizing the very trauma it has worked so hard to de-romanticize. The transformation of a downed civilian airliner and decades of grief into a mystical landscape blooming with horses and illuminated riders may feel, to some readers, like a sublimation that lets the novel off the hook. Akbar is clearly aware of this tension; the return to the 1997 gallery laughter and the earthbound Lispector epigraph are attempts to ground the transcendence in the ordinary. Whether those attempts entirely succeed will depend on the reader’s own appetite for the numinous.

And yet the novel’s willingness to risk failure is part of its argument. To pray for an end to the tyranny of symbols while writing a novel dense with allusion, epigraph, and lyrical flourish is not so much a contradiction as a performance of the difficulty of exit. Akbar does not pretend that stepping out of language is easy, or even possible; he shows a character trying, and the prose—at its best—strains against its own artifice. When Orkideh says that art is a way of storing our brains in each other’s, she is not dismissing language; she is redefining its function. The book’s own style, heavily worked and undeniably poem-haunted, is sometimes at odds with the plainness it valorizes, but that very friction is where the novel lives.

What Martyr! ultimately offers is not a solution to the problem of meaning but a practice—presence, plain speech, the courage to be seen without the armor of martyrdom. It is a novel for readers willing to sit with the possibility that the most important thing one can do with a life may not be to make it mean something grand, but to show up for someone else’s healing. That’s a humbler claim than the book’s maximalist structure might suggest, and it’s all the more durable for it. The strawberry season is now, the femur needs binding, and the laughter at a bad joke in a dismantled gallery is, Akbar insists, enough—more than enough—to answer the pull of the martyr’s fire.

Notable Quotes

Do you have this organ here? A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there's a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there's no panther and it turns out there's no curtain either? That's what I wanted to stop.

Cyrus, playing a dying patient in his medical actor role, breaks character to confess his own experience of existential dread to a medical student — anxiety, addiction, suffering

There's 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.

Cyrus's AA sponsor Gabe responding to Cyrus's belief that he is fundamentally a bad person — morality, recovery, faith

You never send a character onstage without knowing what they want.

Gabe, a playwriting teacher and AA sponsor, challenging Cyrus to articulate what he actually wants from his life — purpose, desire, art

A U.S. Navy warship, the USS Vincennes, fired two surface-to-air missiles. One hit the plane and instantaneously turned it, and the 290 passengers on board, into dust. The reports really said that, Iran Air Flight 655 had been 'turned into dust.' Maybe that was supposed to make the families feel better, it being so instantaneous. Made from dust, returned to dust. It was clean in a way, if you didn't think about it too much.

The narrator describing the 1988 shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655 that killed Cyrus's mother Roya — state violence, euphemism, grief

How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?

Roya Shams, speaking to Lisa Simpson in one of Cyrus's dream dialogues, after discussing the death of coral reefs — ecology, beauty, destruction

My whole life I've thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It's actuarial. Not even tragic, you know?

Cyrus explaining to his friends Zee and Sad James why he wants to write a book about martyrdom — meaninglessness, death, martyrdom

You're talking about people who die for other people. Not dying for glory or an impressable God. Not the promise of a sunny afterlife for themselves. You're talking about earth martyrs.

Orkideh naming the concept that will drive Cyrus's book project during their first conversation at the Brooklyn Museum — martyrdom, sacrifice, secular spirituality

We won't grow old together, Cyrus. But can't you feel this mattering? Right now?

Orkideh to Cyrus during their conversation at the Death-Speak exhibit, placing her cold hand on his — presence, mortality, connection

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.

Orkideh telling Cyrus about the Safavid tradition of repurposing shattered European mirrors into mosque mosaics — identity, fragmentation, Iranian culture, art

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.

Ali Shams reflecting on his daily routine on the chicken farm, enduring decades of grief through sheer obligation — stoicism, survival, grief, labor

Imagine how that might contribute to your sense of amongness. To your sense of earth maybe actually being the right place for you.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a dream sequence, describing how fans sent him records after a fire destroyed his jazz collection — belonging, community, grace

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.

From Cyrus's BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx, his philosophical treatise-in-progress on the ethics of martyrdom — martyrdom, suicide, pride, mortality

A photograph can say 'This is what it was.' Language can only say 'This is what it was like.'

Roya Shams narrating her inability to capture Leila's beauty in words during a taxi ride in Tehran — language, representation, art, love

You feel how even the closed eye is still searching for your face? That is how I have been searching for you.

Leila to Roya in a Tehran alley, placing Roya's finger on her closed eyelid just before their first kiss — desire, queer love, intimacy

I feel dangerous. I don't know how much more baldly I can say it. But how can an Iranian be dangerous without becoming 'a dangerous Iranian'? Without becoming dangerous to every other Iranian in the world or contributing to the myth of the pathologically angry Iranian?

From Cyrus's BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx, wrestling with the impossibility of expressing anger as a racialized subject — race, anger, identity, Islamophobia

I demand to be forgiven. I demand the same leniencies, rationalizations, granted to mediocre men for centuries.

From Orkideh's self-written obituary published in the New York Times after her death — gender, forgiveness, art, defiance

An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.

The closing line of Orkideh's self-written obituary, her final artistic statement — art, mortality, possibility, language

Art is where what we survive survives.

Orkideh's epitaph, displayed on the laminated notice closing the Death-Speak exhibit after her death — art, survival, legacy

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.

Cyrus's realization as he reunites with Zee in Prospect Park after learning the truth about his mother — love, presence, grace

Sang. Listen to me. You are not the patient today.

Janet, Sang Linh's AA sponsor, teaching her the difference between needing help and being able to give it — recovery, service, compassion

This is what you've made? He's all empty! All hollow! He can't believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.

Cyrus telling Sang a discarded hadith about Satan passing through Adam's body and laughing at human hollowness — emptiness, addiction, spiritual hunger

Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.

Cyrus recalling an anthropologist's argument that the first artifact of civilization was a healed human femur, meaning someone cared for another through injury — civilization, care, community

I couldn't help laughing, but laughing didn't need my help.

Sang Linh narrating the novel's final scene, laughing with Orkideh and her son Duy while breaking down a gallery show in 1997 — joy, survival, grace, laughter

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.

From Cyrus's BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx, defending the dream dialogues as a legitimate form of knowledge — dreams, empire, imagination, materialism

I have heard people say smell is the sense most attached to memory, but for me it is always language. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other.

Arash Shirazi reflecting on how arbitrary linguistic categories produce real violence during his service in the Iran-Iraq War — language, war, nationalism, invention