#martyr!

[luthienne]

Kaveh Akbar, from Martyr!

[Text ID: Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.]

[lifeinpoetry]

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

— Kaveh Akbar, from Martyr!

[annabelle--cane]

had a gargantuan number of dishes to wash yesterday so got the audiobook for kaveh akbar's martyr! on a whim to keep me company, and I'm about a third of the way through and I'm liking it a lot, I like the kind of swirling feeling coming from slowly mixing in slices of first person narration from side characters and bouncing around through time. I also think I'm probably not supposed to like cyrus that much in this beginning act, and he clearly has his problems dgmw, but the ways in which he kinda sucks are mostly just endearing to me. he's not completely un self aware and he's already put in substantial effort to make himself and his life better before the start of the main story, so now he's like "okay this is better but I'm still mostly miserable. what now."

[shivtomdivorce]

- Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

[smokefalls]

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. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[yenchips]

i can't explain how but katabasis reminds me of kaveh akbar's martyr! maybe when alice asked "who ever deserves life?" i remembered orkideh's "we spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. and to whom we might pay it. but that's a misunderstanding of grace, which doesn't ask to be paid back."

[tuiskuh]

catching up on my book doodles (one doodle per one finished book) and i just have to say, I absolutely adored this book