Sickness and Martyrdom

🗓 posted Oct 08, 2024 by Josh Erb
🔢 290 words
🏷

I've been sick with a wicked sore throat since last week and finally confirmed that it is strep throat. I am extremely bad at being sick, I'm prone to crank up the melodrama and really lean into my martyr complex.[1]

What better excuse then, to put off my writing for a bit and get lost in a surprisingly apropos book? I've just finished reading Kaveh Akbar's debut novel, Martyr!. Here it is in situ:

It wasn't, by any means, a perfect novel. But it wrestled with big ideas and themes (addiction, death, meaning, the Iranian-American experience, &c.) in a way that resonated. Akbar's poetic use of language was also a pleasure in and of itself. By way of example, here's a sentence he writes to give the reader a sense of place:

"He looked up at the sky, which had begun to clot into blotchy purple clouds."

What a surprising turn of phrase! What refusal to indulge in rote cliché! Every page of the novel is littered with these tiny delights. They made it easy to overlook any quibbles I had with the plot and structure of the story. Ultimately, as with most debuts, the most exciting thing about this book is the flare it sends up about the author's potential. I hope that its success leads to the existence of many more novels written by Kaveh Akbar. I'd look forward to reading them.

  1. I'm not overstating things when I say that it's a wonder my wife does not exile me from our apartment until I'm feeling better. (As you can see, the martyr complex is thriving even now as I write this.)

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