Savage Tongues : A Novel
Author(s): Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
“A luxuriant fevered quest for reclamation...Political, poetical, and spooky good.” —Joy Williams
"A love story of the most fevered, brutal order...Propulsive, erotic, and darkly dreamlike." —Vulture
A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, "written with the intensity of early Marguerite Duras and Ferrante's Days of Abandonment," about a young woman’s search for healing in the fall-out of an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, domination, and human connection (The Millions).
It’s summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood.
Two decades later, Arezu inherits the apartment. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place and finally put to words a trauma she’s long held in silence. Together, she and Ellie catalog the questions of agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure that surface as Arezu confronts the ghosts of that summer, crafting between them a story that spans continents and centuries.
Equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Clarice Lispector, Savage Tongues is a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain, and the life-long search for healing.
Review(s):
Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from Vulture, Refinery29, Lit Hub, and Hey Alma Most Anticipated Book of the Year from Harper's Bazaar, Lit Hub, and The Millions Most Anticipated Book of August from The A.V. Club, Bustle, vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Lambda Literary
"A love story of the most fevered, brutal order...The prose is propulsive, erotic, and darkly dreamlike, recalling the early novels of Marguerite Duras...[SAVAGE TONGUES] interrogates the narratives we assign to the past and asks what we are allowed to expect of those who love us."
"Not many writers can convey both great beauty and horror at the same time, but in Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi does so deftly...Oloomi works through questions of sex, friendship, trauma, and the obliteration of the self, with an inventive approach to time, setting, and character...Oloomi’s sentences, whether evoking pain or pleasure, are electric, filled with life. If I’m honest, when I was reading, I often wished I had written them. The imagery is filmic, and sometimes piercing."
"A novel of ideas...Though steeped in sex and haunted by fleshy frights...their exorcism is mostly a matter of language."
"Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's stunning new novel is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of the way past traumas grip at our insides, threatening to tear us apart years after we've experienced them...Savage Tongues is rigorous in its exploration of the effects that violence and corruption have on our conception of ourselves."
"This is a pulls-no-punches look at abandonment, ownership, trauma, and the convergence of political and personal pain. It is also a touching ode to friendship, a partial salve for these wounds."
"Written with the intensity of early Duras and Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment...With the help of a dear friend, Arezu excavates and puts words to her past trauma in this novel about love, friendship, identity, and displacement."
“A luxuriant fevered quest for reclamation, Savage Tongues is political, poetical, and spooky good.”
“Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Savage Tongues is an international novel careful to record the beauty of the natural world while also chronicling the harm people do to one another in this world. Van der Vliet Oloomi wants to know what we can expect of our families—our fathers, our lovers—when we are the same people who will wage war and destroy our planet in order to do so. This book is relentless in the best way."
“Against the gorgeous, punishing landscapes of Andalusia, the narrator of Savage Tongues relentlessly and movingly anatomizes the links between violence—both personal and systemic—and desire. This uncompromising novel lives at the border of memory and dream, restlessly seeking a logic that can transform cruelty into love.”
ISBN: 9780358315063